About

The idea behind it

On most flag references, sourcing is a property of the page: either the page looks sourced or it does not, and you have to accept all of it at whatever level you accept any of it. Here it is a property of each individual fact. An adoption year can rest on a national flag act while the sentence about what the colours mean, two paragraphs further down, rests on nothing at all — and the page marks that difference on the claim itself rather than putting a badge at the top and letting it cover everything underneath.

That is the whole design. Most of what follows is a consequence of it.

What is on it

195 country pages — the UN member states plus the Holy See and the State of Palestine. Each one carries the flag, its colours, the adoption year, the proportions where a source states them, what the constituting document specifies where one has been read, and the symbolism where a source states it. Each page opens with the passage those facts rest on, quoted in full, with the publisher and the date the document was fetched.

Every page also lists its nearest look-alikes. Those are not judged by eye: each flag image is rasterised at build time and scored against every other one, so the ranking is reproducible and the weighting that produces it is published. /similar sets out the method and lets you pick any flag; /confusable ranks the closest pairs out of all 18,915. There is also a 14-question quiz whose wrong answers are drawn from the same region as the right one, so it cannot be won by elimination.

Where the facts come from

Every entry began as the output of an AI research and writing tool. Two passes have been made over that output since, and they are counted apart on purpose, because they are not the same quality of evidence:

• 17 entries have been held against the document that constitutes the flag — a flag act, a constitution, or in one case an executive order. Those pages quote it and put a crimson mark on each fact it backs.
• 178 entries carry a secondary reference instead — an encyclopaedia article, not the law. Those pages say so at the top, in those words, and keep saying it until a primary document has been read for them.

Both passes were automated. Nobody has gone through the 195 entries line by line, and nowhere does this site call itself reviewed or edited, because it is neither. The methodology page gives the numbers that came out of the checking, including how many claims had to be corrected and how many were deleted for resting on nothing, along with the error rate measured on a sample before any of the checking started. The editorial policy states what part the AI tool played.

Use it for this, not for that

It is a good place to look a flag up, to see the two flags you keep mixing up side by side, and — on the 17 checked entries — to read the exact wording a country used to constitute its flag. It is not a citable authority. The hex codes in particular carry no source at all — they are screen conversions, and the methodology page explains why no flag law supplies them. If a detail matters, follow the link to the document and read it yourself; that is what the links are for.

Who runs it

Hello Internet GmbH, Liebigstr. 8, 80538 Munich, Germany. The managing director, the commercial register entry and the VAT ID are on the Impressum, which is the operator record for this site. No page here carries an author name, because naming one would point at a person who checked these entries, and there is no such person. Corrections, complaints and questions all go to the same address: hello@hellointernet.com. A correction that holds up is applied to the dataset and ships with the next build.