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Hey folks - big fan of the work you're all doing here. I came to humbly request a free SVG coat of arms for the article on John Laird, Baron Laird. I've put full details in the talk page, including a reference drawing from a non-free source which would be great on the page if adapted as a free SVG. I would be very grateful for any assistance. Many thanks in advance :) PointUnderstander (talk) 00:31, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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Nevertheless, many of these files have warnings in their file descriptions saying that these voivodeships didn't yet exist in the 1440s when these rolls of arms were written, so they cannot be representative of either the Volhynian or Nowogródek voivodeships.
Should remove coats of arms from all articles if we cannot be c. 99% sure that they historically represented the country or region we think they represented?
Should we pick one of these anyway just so that we can represent the Novgorod Republic?
Or should we dig deeper into the literature to find an answer, and not change anything until we know more?
I don't know what is common practice surrounding heraldry on enwiki, so that's why I'm posing this question here, so that heraldry experts that I have not pinged could also weigh in. Curious if anyone has a good idea. Good day, NLeeuw (talk) 11:10, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
PS: I notice that the coats of arms in the Armorial Lyncenich and Codex Bergshammar are following the same order. That may simply be because the creator of the Codex Bergshammar used the Armorial Lyncenich as a source, as ruwiki claims in ru:Кодекс Бергшамара and ru:Гербовник Линцених. So the creators did not necessarily independently conclude that this order represented a specific set of regions in a certain hierarchy or something, which might have made it easier to identify them as a set that politically or dynastically belonged together in some way. But it does seem that most of these regions are to be found in historical Lithuania (e.g. the Columns of Gediminas are everywhere), present-day Belarus (smoltenghe = probably Smolensk), and sometimes Poland (grootpolen = Greater Poland). I'm not seeing a connection with Veliky Novgorod, or Volhynia/Volyn', or Novhorod-Siverskyi just yet. The only thing I can think of is that nowengrote could have been a contraction of Nowgorod de Grote ("Novgorod the Great" in Middle Dutch?) to nowengrote, but that it is an adaptation from Polish Nowogrodek to nowengrote seems more plausible to me now. NLeeuw (talk) 11:46, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As much as I like nice medieval emblems, I think that in this case we should remove the purported coat of arms of Novgorod.
There are no mentions of these symbols (castle and white cross) in local primary sources, as far as I can tell.
Some scholars go so far as to say that the Novgorod Republic did not have *the* state emblem (Прошлое нашей родины в памятниках нумизматики, 1977, p. 32 [1]). This article argues with the viewpoint that the image found on novgorodka coins can be considered the state emblem.
The strongest claim I did find was that the image of the "fierce animal" was "almost the coat of arms of Novgorod" (Каменцева Е.И., Устюгов Н.В. Глава IV. Русские печати периода феодальной раздробленности, 1974). The animal looks like this [2] and it was one of the images used on the seals of Novgorod.
None of these two hypothetical emblems look remotely similar to the images we've been using, unfortunately. I wouldn't use them either since both of them appeared in the 15th century and using it for earlier periods would be an anachronism. Alaexis¿question?21:51, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have only seen seals, but not anything akin to a "flag" or "coat of arms". Per MOS:COA and MOS:INFOBOXFLAG, we should not be including such symbols (like CoA) in the infobox anyway, only flags are allowed in certain places. Mellk (talk) 23:02, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My reading of those guidelines does not prohibit the use of coats of arms in infoboxes of military conflicts.
Situations where flag icons may be used in infoboxes include: Summarizing military conflicts...
The bulk of these recommendations are also applicable to official seals, coats of arms, and other representations which serve similar purposes to flag images. (emphasis by me)
Do not use the coat of arms of a person as a stand-in for a national, military, or other flag. (emphasis by me).
Well, it certainly looks a lot cleaner if none of the participants has a symbol, even if some like the GDL, Poland and the Teutonic Order could easily be represented by historically accurate flags in 1410. But for Novgorod, I tend to agree with Alaexis: we've got no good unambiguous representations of Veliky Novgorod / the Novgorod Republic, at least not before the 15th century. I appreciate the other suggestions you did, but you're right; for the conflicts in the 12th and 13th centuries I've been writing about recently, we shouldn't use anything to visually represent Novgorod in infoboxes until we find something historically responsible.
Thank you both for your responses! Feel free to add some more comments that may be helpful for similar situations in the future. The links to MOS:COA and MOS:INFOBOXFLAG are certainly helpful in making these decisions going forward. NLeeuw (talk) 00:01, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The "fierce animal": symbol of Novgorod in 15th century?
User @Sigsjak has recently made a series of edits which have changed how coats of arms of nations are presented in the infoboxes on their pages. In each case the simplest available image, which is typically the escutcheon alone, has been moved to the top of the infobox and other versions of the arms moved down; the effect of this is to give prominence to the escutcheon alone, rather than any full achievement which may exist.
As this is a wide-ranging change I thought it best to open a discussion. The affected pages are:
We've already got links to many old editions of Burke's and Debrett's Peerage through the Internet Archive, Gutenberg, Google Books et al. but these are all scans of physical books. Burke's hasn't actually published for a long time and Debrett's announced in 2019 that future editions will be online only. How shall we get access to these? On their website access requires a paid subscription. Is there anyone in this project group with access? Is there any chance of getting Debrett's added to the Wikipedia Library? Robin S. Taylor (talk) 11:57, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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