Methodology

The flag artwork

Every flag on this site is an SVG from flag-icons by Panayiotis Lipiridis, used under the MIT license and served from this site rather than from a third party. The images are the one part of this site that is not our work and not in question: they are drawn from published specifications and maintained by that project.

The facts

Everything else, the adoption year, the color hex values and what each color is said to mean, the symbolism paragraph, the designer credit, and the list of visually similar flags, is a single dataset of 195 entries that was researched and written by an AI tool. No person has gone through it. There is no editor, no vexillologist, and no author byline, because there is nobody whose checking a byline would stand for.

Since then, 11 of the 195entries have been checked against a primary source: the document that actually constitutes the flag, meaning a flag act, a constitution, or a government-published specification. Not an encyclopaedia, and not this site’s own earlier guesswork. Those pages carry the source, a quote from it, the date it was read, and a superscript on each fact the source backs. Everything without a superscript is unchecked, including on those pages.

That checking was automated. It compared the entry against the text of the document and nothing more; no person read either. The quotes are published so you can do what we did not: judge the comparison yourself.

The pages are a static build: each country page is generated from that one dataset file at build time, so what you read is exactly what is in the data, with nothing added per page.

What we know about the error rate

Rather than guess at how reliable the data is, we checked a sample. A representative 20 countries were cross-checked against Wikipedia, Flags of the World, and official sources. 13 of those 20 contained at least one factual error. That figure describes the original sample, taken before the revision work: it is the state the dataset shipped in, not a measurement of it today. It has not been re-measured since, because a second sample would cost what checking the entries costs, and checking them is the more useful of the two.

The errors were not subtle. Romania’s flag was dated to 1848 instead of 1989, a gap of 141 years. Ireland’s was dated 1919 instead of 1922. Flag colors were missing outright: the green script on Iraq’s flag, the white star on Timor-Leste’s and on Myanmar’s, the bird and stars on Papua New Guinea’s, whose triangle description was also the wrong way round. Belize’s and Seychelles’ blues had the wrong hex values. Libya’s black was given a meaning it does not have. Grenada’s stars were miscounted. Iraq’s 2004 and 2008 redesigns were conflated. A claim that Chad formally protested Romania’s flag at the UN was simply invented.

Those 13 were corrected, and two of them, Ireland and Timor-Leste, have since been checked against their constitutions. That check caught one more error the sample had missed: Timor-Leste’s black was explained as something the white star overcomes, a role the constitution gives the star nowhere. Correcting a page is not the same as verifying it, which is why the two are counted separately here.

The remaining 184 countries have not been checked against a primary source, and there is no reason to think they are cleaner than the 20 that were sampled. Treat every unverified page here as likely to contain an error, and check anything that matters against a primary source before you rely on it.

We publish this number because a site that names its own error rate is more useful than one that implies it has none.

Corrections

If you find an error, and statistically you will, please write to hello@hellointernet.com. Corrections are applied to the dataset and go live with the next build.