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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Strong oppose - North Ossetia and South Ossetia are not the same polity and don't claim to administer the same geographical area. North Ossetia is a federal subject within the Russian Federation. South Ossetia is a disputed region within the internationally recognised borders of Georgia. The fact that North Ossetia and both entities that claim to be the legitimate government of South Ossetia use flags of the same design doesn’t mean we have to have a single article for the flag design. The present set up with separate articles for flags used in North Ossetia and South Ossetia works just fine.Dn9ahx (talk) 15:13, 31 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Strong support. Even if it is two separate territories, it is the same flag, with the same history. It was adopted by the south for the specific reason that it was the flag of the north. There is nothing differentiating the flags and the articles should be merged. Scu ba (talk) 00:03, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Strong support - It is the same flag for clear historical and political reasons. That North and South Ossetia have a separate history and recognition status would be relevant only if it was a merger of these articles that was discussed, but not for the flag itself, that has its own history across the two sides and would benefit from an unified article. Choucas Bleu (talk) 17:03, 11 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support - Apologies in advance for my long and rambly explanation. Years ago there was a discussion asking if Flag of Artsakh should be merged into Flag of Armenia. I opposed that merge (and continue to), as did everyone else who participated in that discussion. The nom in that discussion argued that those pages being separate would be analagous to these two pages being separate. As part of an argument against merging the flags of Artsakh and Armenia, I also made an argument in favor of keeping "Flag of Ossetia" a single article, which I will be repeating here.
Simply put, the flag used by North Ossetia within Russia, the flag used by the partially recognized South Ossetia republic, and even the flag used by the internationally recognized Georgian regional government-in-exile, are all the same flag. It would be one thing if they were all flags that coincidentally looked similar with some minor differences, but this is no Romania/Chad situation, these are actually meaningfully the exact same flag. Unlike many other flags of disputed or partially recognized entities, this is simply the flag of a region or people group; it transcends the borders of any one polity as all sides (Russia, "South Ossetia", and Georgia) all share it.
Of course, we can still have a subsection that further covers individual designs used exclusively by North or South Ossetia (e.g. the flags used by office-holders) as well as any relevant historical flags, but the reader is best served by having a single page for this single flag. No information needs to be lost in the merge process, but putting it all in one place makes it easier to access as there's not enough technical differences for a split to make much sense.
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Alright, so I performed the merger discussed above, and used the opportunity to do some cleaning-up and better linking. Something I did not touch though were the references, which are clearly lacking for some parts of the article. Another thing that I realized was that while the page has information about modern use of the flag, and some (alleged) details on the symbolism, there is no information on the actual origin of the design. It seems like it was already clearly established for Ossetians in 1990, so I think adding an "origins" subsection with the relevant info (if it can be found) would help the article a lot. I am afraid the relevant sources are going to be in Russian/Georgian though. Choucas Bleu (T·C) 20:16, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was reading the entry for the flag of North Ossetia on Flags of the World and that website mentions that the variant with the violet stripe, which Wikipedia has been treating as a factual flag, was erroneous and never existed. The website claims that the violet stripe is the result of a mistranslation of the Russian word "purpurnyĭ", which English media at the time translated to violet, instead of it's more accurate meaning of "dark red" and that a variant with a violet stripe, despite being widely circulated in English media, never existed, and was never used in South or North Ossetia. Scu ba (talk) 17:04, 15 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's interesting. When looking at the image file for the flag with the purple stripe, it does link to a Russian webpage that seems to insist that the flag was changed corresponding to actual governmental decisions at the time. I guess trying to find an actual photography of the flag being used between 1991 and 1994 would settle it, but that may prove difficult. Choucas Bleu (T·C) 09:37, 19 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
