Talk:Flag of the Isle of Man

Civil Ensign
Has the Civil Ensign always been used for ships registered in the IoM, or is it only ships from a certain point in time? Mjroots (talk) 05:56, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
 * It was in use until 1935, abolished, and then reintroduced on 18 September 1971. Orange Tuesday (talk) 22:39, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that. Makes it easier get Manx registered merchant vessels flags correct

Request for comment
Please comment on an RfC at Commons about which version of the flag of the Isle of Man should be used. SiBr4 (talk) 21:53, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Wilson (2000)
This reference is used heavily but as far as I can tell there's no link to the actual text. Anyone know the source? TigerT20 (talk) 18:57, 5 June 2023 (UTC)


 * I am trying to look into it. The source was first added in this edit. Cerebral726 (talk) 19:04, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
 * It may be "The Swastika" by Thomas Wilson, which itself was published in 1895, and then reissued later? It's unclear at the moment. Will need to do some more work to figure out how to rectify the incomplete citation.

Badly bogus sourcing throughout
In addition to the issue above, of a "Wilson (2000)" being cited over and over again with no indication what this source is supposed to be or whether it even exists, the same problem (caused by the same anon edit) also affected alleged sources called "McAndrew (2006)", "Ridgeway (2010)"; "Lloyd (2008)", "Reid (2011)", "Newton (1885)", and a source cited as  that doesn't exist at all. Someone else later added more pseudo-sources: "Trinacria". Sicilian Culture: The Folklore, Legends & Traditions. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 November 2014. and "Sicily." Sicily. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 November 2014..

What we have presently is not an encyclopedia article at all. It's basically the equivalent of some random anons' Facebook posts. These citations either need to be repaired (and I have thus far not with certainty identified any of these sources but one), or all the material cited to them needs to be removed. It is vastly better for us to have a bare-bones but verifiable article than one full of utterly unverifiable claims, especially of Classical (Sicilian or otherwise) origins and connections, a consistent theme of bullshittery that has been running through British Isles "history" since the early middle ages and still promoted today by crackpots like the British Israelite movement.

WP's present unsupportable claims are being copied all over the place, both as an entire article and piecemeal. This is not acceptable. That fact that it's been this badly broken since May 2021 is a "WTF?" matter. I say give this nor more than a few days to be resolved, and then just revert all this crap that doesn't have identifiable and encyclopedically usable sourcing.

I did find of these sources; it is this, and is the oldest and probably least potentially useful (if any of the others are real at all):
 * Reprinted (slightly revised) 1886 in The Manx Note Book, vol. 2, no. 5, pp. 1–19 (with a "Supplementary Note" in no. 7, pp. 125–127). A text-rip of the reprint can be found here, and of the original here. The reprint and its supplement are available in PDF here. The revised version would be the one to cite. I don't have a URL for the original PLPSL paper, anyway.

While it appears to be the origin of the assertion that the triskele was imposed by Alexander III and was taken from the symbol of Sicily, this hypothesis completely ignores that trikeles (often spirals and other forms without much in the way of anthromorphism) were common not only throughout the Celtic cultural expanse, but in the Isles in particular as a pre-Celtic form, back to at least the Neolithic.

I think the most we can do with this material, without a bunch of additional and newer sources, is to compress this entire section down to a summary of Newton's exact argument, without any embellishment or extrapolation, and with specific attribution to him, then contrast this with the long history of triskelic art in the region.

PS: There's a corresponding section at Coat of arms of the Isle of Man that is pretty much just a copy-paste of all this anon-authored material. After whatever repair job is done on this stuff, it needs to be moved into that article (since the flag is later and based on the arms), and either sectionally transcluded into this article, or just summarized here even more concisely. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:44, 9 July 2024 (UTC)