Talk:Mount Athos/Archive 1

Archive 1

Name pronounciation

On map showing position of MountAthos it's virtually impossible to see the intended position. Maybe a circle or arrow to site would help our poor old eyes.

I want to clarify the pronounciation of greek vowels and consonants. I am from Greece but I live in UK now and I can understand why is this so difficult for not Greecs to pronounce Greek words. Hagion Oros will be the most accurate tranfer from greek to English even though "H" is not needed for the greeks. The letter "n" at the end of Hagion is basically coming from ancient greek. Due to the fact that Hagion Oros kept all the traditional characteristics of the past Greek History, it would have been discrepancy of not using ancient greek in their everyday time. I dont mean that they talk to each other in ancient greek but all the Hymnoi and songs that are being performed during ceremonies are all in ancient greek. I hope to make it more simple to everyone to assimilate greek pronounciation history as well as traditional and cultural principles. --nakos2208

"Ayion Oros" seems to be a case of using the letter "y" to transliterate the Greek letter gamma. Usually in English the most famous building in Istanbul is called the "Hagia Sophia", not the "Ayia Sophia". What criteria govern the choice of letters in transliterating from Greek? Surely transliterated etyma in dictionaries would have said "Hagion Oros", wouldn't they? -- Mike Hardy

I have no idea. I don't speak or read Greek and just used the spelling that existed in other articles here. I did note that other external pages also use either your suggestion (Hagion), or Agion (see the external link). I'm not aware of any established prefered Greek > Latin transliteration on Wikipedia, so if there is one clearly official transliteration, then feel free to change the Greek words in Wikipedia. -Scipius 22:44 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)

I think "Hagion" is classical and "Ayion" is more modern, although in actual Greek letters the spelling is probably the same. The "Greece" article says "Elliniki" rather than "Helleniki", and I suspect that's deliberate modernity. (I'm no expert though. If someone with actual expertise in this area decided to change "Hagion" to "Ayion" or something else, could they explain the relevant facts about the Greek language here on this talk page?) -- Mike Hardy

And now I've Googled it, and I find both spellings and some others. I think in Greek it's alpha-gamma-iota-omicron-nu, with a "breath-mark" before the alpha if you follow conventions taught in classical Greek courses. I definitely prefer "Hagion", not only because gamma is conventionally thought of as corresponding to our "g", but also because it's in accord with "Hagia Sophia", so that keeps things simple by not having several spellings. -- Mike Hardy

Another problem: If it is "Hagion Oros" or "Ayion Oros" in Greek, then whence the name "Athos"? Isn't it from Greek? If so, is it part of a Greek phrase consisting of more than one word, that would be translated by saying "Mount Athos"? I'm guessing the spelling would be ΑΘΟΣ. -- Mike Hardy

In both modern and ancient Greek there is no 'h'. In ancient Greek there is a breath-mark before the 'a', but this was likely not pronounced as an English 'h' would be. Most Greeks consider the transliterations "Hagia" or "Hagion" (along with "Hellenic" and other similar forms) to be mistaken renditions and are attempting to correct the error (much as the transliteration of the Indian city of Bombay is being corrected to Mumbai and the Chinese city of Peking was corrected to Beijing decades ago).

As for Athos, Greeks typically (at least in modern Greek) simply refer to mountains using the name, as typically only well-known mountains are referred to by name. Hence, the mountain is simply "Athos" (similarly, what would be called "Mount Olympus" in English is simply "Olymbos" in Greek). I suppose something like "to vouno Athos" ("the mountain 'Athos'") would be acceptable as well when context was unclear, but it is certainly not common. Delirium 07:43 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Well, the Greek name is Αθως (or ΑΘΩΣ in capital letters). I've changed the second name (Άγιον Όρος) since the punctuation did not show. My question is: now that I can see it properly is it because I have Greek fonts installed in my computer or not? Do other users see it properly? Please comment, since I don't want to ruin wikipedia pages by changing the Greek fonts. Thanks! --User:193.218.90.23 15:11, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

EU VAT area

Would anybody happen to know why Mount Athos - alone of all Greek mountains - is not part of the EU VAT area? (Special member state territories and their relations with the EU#Greece) -- Itai 22:08, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

• If that is true, then it would reflect the Greek desire that EU law should not automatically apply on Mount Athos (reflected in its accession treaty), and thus preserving its autonomy. --Henrygb 00:25, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
  • It would be nice to see a mention of this in the article; does anybody know details? --The Minister of War 09:38, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
    • I believe it was a condition of joining the EU by the Greeks.

Peninsula of Mount

"Mount Athos is a mountain and a peninsula" - I'm sorry, but I find it a little hard to believe that the peninsula is called "Mount Athos", not just "Athos". Maybe this sentence could be rephrased? Or, according to the discussion above (as Greeks do not stress the 'Mount' part anyway), could the article be renamed something like 'Athos (mountain and peninsula)'? --Oop 14:29, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

I belive Mount Athos is the name of the peninsula and not a direct scientific description of the area in geologycal terms --JvlivsCaesar 01:46, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Peninsula, mountain and autonomous monastic republic

Athos as a name is used for all of these. I propose we keep this article for the monastic republic and create separate articles for the other two: Athos (mountain) and Athos (peninsula). Thoughts? --Michalis Famelis (talk) 02:02, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

The photo

The photo should say which monastery this is, by name.

Additional, commented out information

I resectioned and rearranged the whole article, but I don't have time to do any actual editing. The following (huge) chunk was commented out ( with these: <-- ''text here'' --!> in the article and seems to contain information (I didn't read it, it just looks like it).

By the way, to the editor who added this commented out: don't be ashamed to make your additions visible. Wikipedia is not created by some "enlightened" elite, but by common people like you and me. Be bold in editing! --Michalis Famelis (talk) 15:34, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

the info

When Pres. Putin visited Rossikon this year, no Ukrainian connection was mentioned. The above monasteries are not property of a specific country, but "belong" to some nationalities by tradition, based on old documents. Any Orthodox monk, from any nationality, can be accepted in any of the monasteries, but most monks feel better if they are together with people speaking the same language. The "Serbian" monastery was donated by emperor Alexios III Komninos (1195-1203) "to the Serbs as eternal gift..." The "Romanian" skiti of St. John the Forerunner (skiti Timiou Prodromou) has a document from the monastery of Great Lavra dated 1820 according to which it was donated "to the devout tribe of Moldovans for creating a coenobitic skiti". I do not know any official document about the "Romanian" Lakkoskiti, although inscriptions of 1606 AD show that the monks were Slavs (possibly Moldovans) while in 1754 are documented as Moldovans. Part of Moldova of that time belongs now to Romania, while another part is today independent bearing the name Moldova. The "Bulgarian" Zografou monastery has no such documents - possibly there were, but destroyed. Up to 1192 it is proven that its monks are Greeks. The Bulgarian Chzar John II Asan (1218-1241) renovated the monastery. In the 14th century the monastery was burned together with 26 monks by raiders, possibly Catalans (although some tradition says that was destroyed by the "Pope"), and all the documents were lost. Between 15th and 19th century it had monks from different countries, like Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Vlachia (Romania) and received also great donnations from different countries. Between 1862-1896 it was renovated with expences of the Bulgarian government. Now about the "Russian" monastery. The presence of Russian speaking monks is detected since 1020 in a small monastery named "of Xylourgos", that is today "the Bulgarian skiti Vogoroditsa". In 1169 the abbot asked from the "Holy Assembly" of the monks of Mount Athos for a bigger monastery, because the brotherhood was very big and the "Thessalonikeos Monastery" was offered. In this monastery (today is known as Palaiomonastiro) the services in the church were held both in Greek and Russian language. In the beginning of the 14th century it was also burned down by the Catalans and all archives were destroyed. Very difficult years follow. The Russian traveller Barski in 1725-26 records 4 monks only (2 Russians and 2 Bulgarians) while in 1744 the monks are a few Greeks - no Russians. A little later the monks are transferred to the harbor of the monastery to make their life easier, and this is the place of the monastery of St. Panteleimon of today. In 1806 it was recognized by a Patriarchal edict as "coenobitic monastery of Kallimachis family". This family (of Greek origin) had given many local governors at the countries around the lower part of Danube river (Today we can say Romania and Moldova). In 1874 in this monastery there were 400 Russians and 190 Greek monks, and in 1875 the new elected abbot was Russian. In 1895 the Russian monks reached 1000 and in 1902 about 1500. This "growth" was part of the Russian target to create a naval base in the Aegean Sea for the Russian fleet. During the WWI and after the Communist revolution of 1917) the Russian "soldger-monks" returned to their country and only the real monks remained. It is still called "Russian", but according to the Patriarchical edict it belongs to the "Kallimachis family". This can be interpreted as if it belongs to the "people governed by Kallimachis family" (a monastery can not be property of a family), and on that time those people were living around Danube river and not in Russia. It is documented that most of the monks of the "Russian monastery" today are from Ukraine and according to my personal experience, some years ago there were 17 monks. Anyway, I do not want to fight about all this, and I don't know if all this info has to be placed in this encyclopedia. - Thank you for your comment, this means that there is really scientific check-up of all the info in this great site. Stefanos Sakellaridis - Greek - but living now in Philippines. You can erase this info or you can use it in any way you like !!!

Women

The article states that, because the peninsula was given to Mary, Mother of God as her private garden, it was therefore out of bounds to all other women. It then goes on to say that women are prohibited due to sexual temptation of the monks. Which is right? (and if the answer is "both", the Mary explanation should be briefly re-stated at the area mentioning the sexual temptation angle.) --Canuckguy 05:27, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

The Holy Mountain is prohibited actually to all females, including mammals, not just human women. This is indeed because it was dedicated to Mary, and has nothing to do with monks being tempted by sexuality. Eugene-elgato (talk) 23:38, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

The above would need a source. See bottom of discussion. Shadowmorph ^{^"^} 09:18, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Conflict between groups of monks on Mount Athos

As this appears to be an occasional/intermittent occurrence - an incident was reported in the news today - there should be a couple of sentences on the subject. Jackiespeel 14:59, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

For a more thorough description of the conflict see Esphigmenou Monastery#Controversy. --Michalis Famelis (talk)

Greek -> English

The English needs touching up - I'll do it if no one objects. InfernoXV 08:58, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Not quite sure what you mean (the article is not a translation from the Greek wikipedia) but the article does need cleanup, especially the "Administration and organization" and "Culture and life in the Hagion Oros" sections. You are more than welcome to help!! :-) --Michalis Famelis (talk) 14:16, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Tour Guide Format

Parts of this entry seem to depart from being encyclopaedic and take on the format of a "tour guide", including advisories as to what the intending visitor should see and do. In this regards, the POV loses neutrality.

-- AnonymousDonor

Just thought i'd mention that a useful english expression for 'diamonitirion' is 'hermit permit'.

-- Tom Anderson 2007-06-26 17:22 +0100

I agree the previous "hospitality" section was too tour-guide-ish, but something on the subject should be added, I think. The fact that the number of "pilgrims" (in reality mostly tourists) is going up while the number of monks is going down has had significant impact on the economics and social life of the monasteries. I'll see if I can dig up an article about it. --Delirium 02:10, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikitravel has the beginnings of a travel guide at [1], relevant content here should (where GFDL/CC licensing allows) be moved over. Jpatokal (talk) 06:17, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Mount Athos in EU

Mount Athos is a full part of Greece, European Union and its custom territory, only it's outside EU VAT territory. I removed the wrong news, which included a comparison with Channel Islands which had nothing to do with reality, because Channel Islands are stranger at all to EU. More, I don't understand what you mean in writing that Dora Bakoyannis is the "head of State" of Mount Athos, which seems, also, a provocation for an only-males state. Being part of Greece, the Head of State is the President of Greece; for local purposes, there is not a Head of State, but a democratic Council represented all monasteries. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Costantinople, whose name is Vartholomaios I (not Bartholomew: he is not and Englishman!) is only the religious leader,being the Republic in his territory, together Turkey, Crete, Dodekanessos, Wester Europe, one of the two Orthodox churches of Estonia, America, Oceania and the Metropolitan See of Hong Kong. VAl FROM EU —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.53.112.221 (talk) 07:49, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah the "head of state" is weird. Mount Athos is an autonomous region of Greece, much like the Åland Islands are an autonomous region of Finland, and as so it doesn't itself really have a head of state, but is ultimately under its parent country's head of state. As far as the position towards the EU, yes, all of Greece is part of the EU... Mount Athos is just: 1) outside the VAT regime; and 2) specially exempted from some parts of EU legislation as part of Greece's accession treaty. --Delirium (talk) 07:59, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

The English, Spanish, and Italian Wiki-articles describe Mt. Athos as an ecclesiastic elective monarchy. I dont believe the 1927 constitution of Mt. Athos described it as a monarchy nor republic. I think that it is better described as an 'autonomous monastic state' within Greece, with an elected Superior (Abbot) called a Protos, who is head of the secular government in Karyes; The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is the spiritual head. Why was this listed as an elective monarchy.? This term should be edited out. Kaelin von Gross —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.225.8.161 (talk) 23:28, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Prohibition of entry for women

The article states that women are prohibited from entering "not in order to reduce sexual temptation", but because "monks feel that the presence of women alters the social dynamics of the community and therefore slows the path towards spiritual enlightenment". Right afterwards, it goes on to clarify that female animals are also forbidden entry.

How, exactly, would female domesticated animals "alter the social dynamics of the community?"

Seems like fancy dressing for medieval views of the female (of all species, no less!) as "unworthy" or "unclean". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.1.250.70 (talk) 00:55, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

The talk page is about discussion of edits, not about one's views of the subject. InfernoXV (talk) 04:49, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

The claim should probably be referenced, though (the citation at the end of the paragraph doesn't say anything about social dynamics). --Delirium (talk) 05:01, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah the mountain traditionally was dedicated by Mary to herself, and it became custom that no female animal should step foot there; this was crystallized by a Byzantine imperial edict on the matter. Eugene-elgato (talk) 23:40, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

There is no indication that this is true. I removed the unreferenced material about animals. The source that was previously there was a joke, not reliable. It was a reply about potentially one single monastery and the author stated explicitly that the matter was outside his expertise. The first sentence about the reasons of why the monks protect the prohibition also needs a citation. Shadowmorph ^{^"^} 09:15, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

The monks prohibit female domestic animals because they require extra maintenance. It's not a "medieval superstition", it's for practicality. All monks are required to attend every service which cannot be done when there are cows to be milked. Here is a video where a monk explains the matter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_04DRh2rEiE&feature=related

You have to go to about 4:35. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.234.185.196 (talk) 02:42, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Infobox

The infobox has some flaws. The first flag shown is not the official nor used by all the monasteries who use their own flags. Since mount Athos is inside the sovereignty of Greece the proper flag to display would be the flag of Greece. Since Agion Oros is also a subordinate to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople then the seal (not "coat of arms") of that can be used. I believe that in the seal of the Patriarchate the eagle does not hold a sword in its "hand" but rather a cross. All that would need some footnote descriptions and maybe the standard country infobox poses a problem. Shadowmorph ^{^"^} 09:26, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Here is a photo of an official occasion in Karyes, Mount Athos

• http://www.daylife.com/photo/00jydXvbzidy8(broken)

The Ecumenical Patriarch, the head of the Orthodox Church, is seen together with Greek officials. The two flags chosen by the autonomous community itself to be displayed there are the traditional Greek flag and the Byzantine flag with the double headed eagle in the yellow background. Unfortunately there is not enough resolution to portray if the "eagle bearing the cross" or the one bearing the sword is shown in the flag. Shadowmorph ^{^"^} 10:05, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

HMS Ark Royal

What is the connection of this vessel to Mount Athos? I've read all this article and also the whole of the relevant article on HMS Ark Royal and I cannot find a stated connection. Agent0060 13:29, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

This question is now answered in the article: Stamps for Mount Athos were printed there. Btw, if someone wants to follow this up, the section, as it stands appears, to be a cut-and-paste copyright violation of "Travel Greece" 67.180.16.240 (talk) 07:00, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Minor corrections and a formatting problem

I made some small factual corrections regarding the helicopter crash on 11 September 2004 that killed Patriarch Petros of Alexandria and his entourage, and added citations.

Perhaps more importantly, while doing this, and switching from one computer to another, I noticed that although the formatting of the article is fine in IE8, in IE9 the formatting is incorrect. There is a large white space after the Contents box, with the section entitled Geography appearing below the last info box on the right, rather than alongside the info boxes.

Sorry, I've no idea how to correct this myself. StefanosPavlos (talk) 21:36, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Flags, "official" languages, etc.

For what feels like the millionth time, I've had to remove the flag entry and some other stuff from the infobox. In all these years during which people have been stubbornly reinserting these things, nobody has ever brought forward any evidence at all that Mount Athos has any such thing as an official flag. The Byzantine eagle flag is simply the flag of the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, and of course I assume it will be used on Mount Athos, just as it is used by orthodox churches all over the world, but that doesn't make it a flag of Mount Athos as such. Unless there is a statutory text defining this flag explicitly and officially as the flag of this specific jurisdiction, it doesn't belong in the infobox.

Same goes for the list of "official" or "recognized" languages. I haven't seen any evidence that the monastic community has any such thing as an explicit language policy defining what its "official" or "recognized" languages are, beyond the simple fact of practical tradition. As long as there's no official designation of such languages, they don't belong in the box either.

And, of course, the "religion" entry in the box should say "Eastern Orthodox", and not a list of separate Greek, Serbian etc. "orthodoxies". These are, after all, supposed to be all the same religious denomination. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:34, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Emphasising non-Greek languages for Mount Athos - especially in language articles rather than this one - is only going to mislead readers. No doubt the use of a particular language among a handful of monks is of great importance to a small number of ethnically- or religiously-motivated editors, but it's not a meaningful part of the language's coverage. As much Latin is spoken at my alma mater - and at most universities - as Bulgarian is spoken on Mount Athos; but we don't make the infobox of Latin say that it's spoken in a thousand academic institutions. Countless businesses around the world speak English in the boardroom, but we don't add countless boardrooms to the infobox of English language. Or, if editors would rather focus on the official aspect, I would query which Greek MFA document declared that its subject territory officially uses non-Greek languages... Got a source? bobrayner (talk) 20:04, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

(copying the following over from my talkpage – Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:12, 14 December 2014 (UTC))

Hi, I see you have removed the languages from the infobox about Mount Athos. These languages are used in e liturgy (and is spoken) in the following Monasteries:

Russian language is the liturgical language in the Agiou Panteleimonos monastery

Serbian language is the liturgical language in the Hilandar monastery.

I confirm these 2 languages are indeed used officially in these 2 monasteries! Been there myself. I don't have proof to present you as documented fact as people don't get anything when visiting the monasteries.

But I can't confirm that the Bulgarian language is used in the Zograf Monastery because I haven't been there myself. However, somebody listed Mount Athos under the list of entities that officially are using the Bulgarian language, alongside Bulgaria and European Union... You can find Mount Athos listed here: Bulgarian language.

Also, aside from Bulgarian language's page, I noticed that the Mound Mount Athos is listed in these pages too: Serbian language, Romanian language, Russian language. That is why I updated the M.A. page, to be in accordance with the other pages.

Note that Mount Athos does not have its own constitution, nor the Greek constitution binds it. Also, the EU laws and norms do not apply here. Women are prohibited and only monks and male workers, including Fire Department are permitted to visit it. Monks of all ethnicities can live here for infinite days, even withjout EU passports. Liturgy is done by tradition in Greek at Greek monasteries, and in other languages in monasteries of other countries.

I couldn't remove languages from into box if they are really recognised (as the corresponding pages about these languages claim), but what I for sure know is, it is a fact that the monasteries have their own traditions, as they are independent from each other, free to conduct liturgy in their native languages. -AuditoreEzio (talk) 19:21, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

There is no question those languages are used in those monasteries. The question is whether their use (or that of Greek, for that matter) has a formally recognized, explicit official basis, such as being enshrined in a governing statute of the community in some way. In the absence of such an explicit status, I don't see what these pieces of information have to do in the infobox. The same goes for the flag, which you have now edit-warred back in the infobox again, without engaging in talk first [2]. Again, the fact that the flag is flown on the peninsula is, in and of itself, of no significance whatsoever, because it doesn't mean it is the flag "of Mount Athos", as such. It is the flag of a larger entity to which the Athos monasteries happen to belong – the orthodox church –, not a flag specific to the Athos community. (Just as the fact that, say, the French flag is flown in Paris doesn't make it the "flag of Paris"). Again, if you think that this flag has been officially designated the flag "of Mount Athos", cite a reliable source to that effect (and not some random Wikipedia page, as you did.) I shall remove this again, and I am warning you against continuing to edit-war, as you have done so often in the past. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:12, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Most customers speak Portuguese in the bar near my house. It doesn't mean that bar is officially part of the Lusosphere; it's just a place where a few expats meet. So what? Either we get a reliable source that specifies these official languages, or we remove claims that they're official languages. bobrayner (talk) 20:56, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

First of all let me note that prior to reverting your edits, I did check the talk page first, but you had no comments left here. Apparently the talk page i visited was the cached version of it (your complaints to Wikimedia, not me), and the only way to see that you posted a comment was via your User Contribs page. Second, the yellow flag with the double eagle, is the one and same flag the monks raise anywhere in Mount Athos, it be on the central squares of their monasteries or in the offices in the main building. The monastic state uses this flag to represent it in the meetings at Ouranoupolis and is used anywhere. I have no documents how this flag came to use by the monastic state, but if you remove it from its infopage, you better do the same on Greek Orthodox Church's page because no proof exists how this flag is the OFFICIAL flag of the entire church, except that it is used, like Athos does. Am I wrong? There are no proofs that the GOC declares in its charter that the double headed eagle on its white background is actually official. You too, won't find proof of its official status, but you will find fact that it is used as official in all churches of the GOC and its diaspora. If we shall remove the flag from Mount Athos page, then, I suggest the same to be done for the Greek Orthodox Church's page as well, as no official document proves it is official in GOC aside from its use and mention.-AuditoreEzio (talk) 21:04, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

If anything is disputed, I would support a fundamentalist approach to WP:BURDEN. bobrayner (talk) 21:10, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Bobrayner, All I did is to see Mount Athos listed as State recognizing officially some languages, in these pages: here, here, here and here, all I did from my part is just to update Mount Athos page accordingly. It wasn't me who added Athos in the list of countes/states officially recognizing these languages, in each of their pages... And same for the flag: first saw the Greek Orthodox Church page claiming its flag is used as Athonite Banner, and all I did is just to update Athos page! I fail to understand why you raise disputes here at Athos page when the disputed info is borrowed from other pages...-AuditoreEzio (talk) 21:23, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Here we go! You wanted facts that the double headed eagle is of the Mount Athos and not just "Orthodox Church of Constantinople's" as Future Perfect argued...

Fact 1: The official documents of the Monastic State of Mount Athos have the Double Headed Eagle as their insignia

Fact 2: the entrance signpost to the Monastic State of Mount Athos has the double Headed Eagle encarved on its top. When people enter the territory of the Monastic State, are welcomed with Emblem of the State, not a symbol belonging exclusively to another church as some here may have the false impression:

Fact 3: Agiorite Monks waving Agiorite flag...

Fact 4: The flag is raised as official on every Athonite Chapel, Church and Monastery in Mount Athos,alongside Greek national flag:

Fact 5: The official stamp used in Mount Athos to verify Athonite documents, is Double Headed Eagle in blue ink. The stamp writes: "[monastery's name] of the Holy Mountain".

Fact 6 - The official website of the Monastic State of Holy Mountain, "In Athos.gr", which anyone can visit and learn more about Mount Athos, features the map of the state, and on top of it, the Athonite emblem, a Double Headed Eagle, proudly stands on top of the page:

Double Eagle flag anywhere, Double Eagle in the Monastic State's official documents, Double Eagle on signs and monuments.

The Double Headed Eagle is the official emblem of the Athonite state, and which the Athonite state use in its flag too... None can deny this fact. I have no access to the legislation of the Athonite state, however I proved that the organization considers the double headed eagle to be its official emblem, if not legally, at least by tradition, and I proved that the Athonite state also uses the very same symbol it in its flag. The Athonite state uses no other flags, only one flag for all of its monasteries - the Double Headed Eagle on a yellow background for all occasions, including the diplomatic protocols such as in the visits to Mount Athos and the representations at Ouranoupolis. AuditoreEzio (talk) 00:45, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

The user 31.153.50.47 came with a good idea - have the flag as thumbnail next to text, this way none can dispute it. FutPerf, you should not remove this! It is good now. Thanks, 31.153.50.47! -AuditoreEzio (talk) 04:36, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

You still don't see the analogy, do you? Yes, of course, all sorts of institutions on Mount Athos use the eagle symbol. Just like all sorts of official institutions in Paris use the French flag. That doesn't mean the French flag is the flag "of Paris". It's the flag of France, of which Paris is only a part. You have still not provided evidence that the eagle symbol is the emblem "of Mount Athos", rather than that of the larger entity of which the Athos institutions are merely a part. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:36, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Fut.perf., your analogy fails. The unnamed official institutions in Paris you refer to are not related to France in the same way as Mt. Athos is related to Greece. Mt. Athos has a unique political recognition going back centuries, for which there is no reasonable analogy. Let it go. Evensteven (talk) 16:08, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Fut.Perf. makes two assumptions: (a) that the flag we show in the infobox must be the official flag of the state, and (b) that for the flag to be official it needs to be adopted in law or some such. Instead of brushing him off for apparently having posited a "failed" analogy, you might wanna argue the essence. 31.153.50.47 (talk) 17:09, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

You are quite right, 31.153.50.47; that came off sounding rather combative. I think you make two excellent points about "official" and "lawful", and agree backing for neither are required for inclusion of the flag here unless we say "official" or "lawful". Fut.Perf., it is the west that is obsessed with officialdom and lawyering, and it is the west that invented the separation of church and state. Mount Athos is all about the Church, and, as the article says in section 3.5, "Modern times", it operates "following ancient privilege". That is a privilege granted by the state, in a region where church and state have never been considered separate, but are in a mutual relationship that is as harmonious as they both can maintain. That is more harmonious when Greeks rule their own land, and was probably less (but not absent) when the Ottoman Empire ruled, and even extended so far as a request and acceptance of Hitler's brief protection during three years of World War II. (Who knows what Hitler might have thought about the ancient privilege; his protection was even less temporary than his regime, and the question apparently did not arise.) But the ancient privilege is really that the Church governs Mt. Athos, being under the Ecumenical Patriarch, but under daily control of the Epistassia, who govern it as a church rather than as a state. So lines blur a little here, and world norms do not apply, and the officialdom of the state is absent, and the officialdom of the Church is concerned with spiritual matters much more than with establishing a state law. If the flag flies on Mount Athos, alone without the flag of Greece or the European Union, then that is because that practise has the blessing of the Epistassia, and that is all the "official" you get. What you see is what you get. No other law is necessary. Not like France, right? Evensteven (talk) 20:16, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Future Perfect, what you said makes sense but your methods and logic are wrong. Yesterday you made the point that the Infbox is where only "official by law" stuff goes, while any "official by use" or "official by tradition" stuff has no place in it, right? In this case, couldn't be more productive of your part, dear FutPerf, to just move, yesterday, the flag from the infobox to other parts of the article (since you were, as you stated in one of your comments, aware, for a long before me that while the flag's status was unproven, its use by the authorities was not disputed) instead of removing it completely all together from the page? You rushed, 2 days ago, to revert my edits instead of putting them into a more appropriate place, by moving the flag to lower parts of the article...

FutPerf, removing the flag entirely from the article at the beginning of our bispute, was like claiming that there was no evidence of a such flag in Athos, (while clearly the opposite was true), and turned out to be a dispute of its unproven official/unofficial status which is a completely different case. I mean, the whole edit revert war could have been avoided if you just moved the flag somewhere else due to being unprovenly unofficial. After all, you complained that, "In all these years during which people have been stubbornly reinserting these things", because you failed to distinguish the difference between the status (official or unofficial) of a flag, and the right of the people to this information (the people reading about Mount Athos should have the right to be informed that there is indeed a flag used in that place, be it official or not). Because the presence of information, official or not, is what makes Wikipedia. After all, Wikipedia is about facts.

So I did clear out this dispute, and eliminated the possibility that the presence of flag in Athos is not coincidal, that the use of Double Headed Eagle in all official aspects of Athonitre institutions and its flag, prove the right for the flag to be in article, regardless of how official this is. For as long as its use, official or traditional, is proved.

Second, about languages, I shall note that Im just trying to include as much detail as possible in every page, with info borrowed from other pages (aka synchronize different pages in the same Wikipedia) so if the Russian language page lists "Mount Athos" in the list of entities using OFFICIALLY the language, shouldn't you, dear FutPerf, instead of simply reverting my edits in Mount Athos' page (which I did so info is in accordance with the Russian lang page), you also take measures for that other page where the disputed info originated from? You rightfully reverted my Recognized Language edits which are based on info borrowed from other pages, but I feel that you are ignoring these pages. Should I take action instead? What could be best, edit Russian language page directly and remove Athos from its infobox, or ask in the talkpage and put citations? Note: Same issue for infoboxes in Bulgarian, Serbian and Romanian pages too, Mount Athos is listed in them...

EDIT: nevermind, it has been addressed already! No more false info in the pages of the languages, thats nice. Thanks!.-AuditoreEzio (talk) 17:22, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Also I agree with Evensteven that Mount Athos is very unique and cannot be treated in a sense like how most institutions are treated, Mount Athos is one of the longest-surviving recognized entities in the world, existing more centuries than most other institutions ever did. Its very old, outmatched perhaps only by few, such as Vatican in terms of continuous political recognition, and autonomy too.-AuditoreEzio (talk) 17:32, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

tl;dr. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:47, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Very well, your choice. Not a way to make progress, though. There are things you don't understand. Evensteven (talk) 00:04, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

References

Greek Constitution, Article 105 is pretty vague with respect to the issue at hand. On the other hand here is the Καταστατικὸς Χάρτης Ἁγίου Ὄρους; article β'.26 (cited in the relevant Greek wikipedia article) is about the language, it's Greek; I guess this is as official as it could get. Article γ'.31 describes the only official thing/symbol I've found described therein, the seal but it's not the Eagle (there are also official seals for each monastery, but well, by definition they're not about all of Mount Athos). Now out of the refs used at the Greek Orthodox Church article, this seems to me to be the most serious looking, the most promising, the one one could cite here; I would prefer something much more authoritative, but the sources-via-google seem sparse or silent on the issue so this source could perhaps suffice... Thanatos|talk|contributions 20:53, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Future Perfect again, after some years have passed, he removed the flag without any explanation: link, link. I hope he will at least explain to us so we can know what changed since this discussion here. --SILENTRESIDENT 08:40, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Nothing at all changed. You failed to understand the argument back then, you still fail to understand it now. My position is still the same, and the argument is right up here in this thread. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:45, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Nothing changed, indeed - in Mount Athos at least. Your opinion is well-known, but do not ever assume that your edits have been reverted because of disagreement on opinions. The problem is - Wikipedia is based on facts, not opinions. The monastic state currently uses it as its flag on all occasions - both formal and not, both alongside with the Greek flag in public spaces and alone in private chambers. Nothing more, nothing less. Unless this changes, you shouldn't remove it from the article. I wish the Holy Mountain had a constitution like most organizations and states in the world do nowadays, so this can end once and for all, but sadly they do not, nor they are planning to create one anytime soon. They never needed any constitutions before and I am afraid some Wikipedians questioning this won't help the monks make up their mind on this. Later, I will search on the web for publications by scholars/academics on Holy Mountain and see if there is anything that can be used as third-party reference to the flag. At least, this could help in partially resolving this, although I am not having my hopes high. --SILENTRESIDENT 10:28, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Unreliable sources

I appreciate Dr. K.'s attempt at adding sources to the flag issue, but I'm afraid I'll have to object to some or most of them as unreliable.

1. Vitali Vitaliev (1 September 1995). Little is the light: nostalgic travels in the mini-states of Europe. Touchstone Books. – Let's not waste time on this one; this booklet of personal travel memories is quite obviously not a publication of any academic standing.
2. William G. Crampton (1990). The Complete Guide to Flags. Gallery Books. p. 57. ISBN 978-0-8317-1605-9. – I don't know if this book as such counts as reliable, but what is the quoted snippet "Greek Yellow with a 2-headed Orthodox black eagle (also for Mount Church Athos)" even supposed to mean? Dr.K., did you just copypaste Google snippets without access to the context? What on earth is "Mount Church Athos"? What is "Greek Yellow"? And what else is it supposed to be "also" a flag of, besides "Mount Church Athos"?
3. Tomasz Kamusella (2008). The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe. Springer. p. 975. This is, at first sight, the strongest and most directly relevant source, but it is faulty. First, the passage in question is only a footnote in a book that is mainly about unrelated topics (nationalism and language in central Europe), and there is no evidence the author has any first-hand expertise on this specific issue. In fact, there is strong evidence that he is getting things seriously wrong.
   Greece annexed southern Macedonia, including Chalcidice, in 1913. In the same year, Mt Athos declared its independence as a monastic republic under Greece's protection. Seriously? Athos didn't declare "independence", and it didn't place itself "under Greece's protection"; what Mt Athos declared was autonomy within Greece and under Greek sovereignty (at a time when it had already been factually annexed). A source that doesn't even get the distinction between independence and autonomy right is certainly not a reliable source about anything regarding state symbols.
   Where did Kamusella get this from (having evidently not done first-hand original historical research on Athos)? Checking the sources he provides, you can easily find that he copied this near-verbatim from a Czech general-purpose popular encyclopedia, František Honzák et al. (eds) (2001) Evropa v promenách staletí. Prague: Libri, p.59. (There, it says: "Roku 1913 republika vyhlásila samostatnost pod ochranou Řecka, které po 1 . balkánské válce připojilo okolní území. Roku 1927 se stal mnišský stát součástí řeckého území (jedním z okresů) s autonomním statutem.") That encyclopedia actually gets it doubly wrong, first making that same mistake about "independence" and then asserting that Athos only became part of Greek territory in 1927. Kamusella has been uncritically copying here.
   But where then does Kamusella get his very next sentence from, the one that claims that "The republic adopted the crowned imperial double-headed eagle [...] as its flag? This factoid is not in the Honzák source, nor indeed in any of the other sources quoted, as far as I could check. We can only conclude he got it from somewhere on the Internet – not unlikely, from Wikipedia. I call WP:Citogenesis on this. For the strong claim implied here, that there is not merely a tradition of use, but that there was a conscious and formal political decision to "adopt" that flag, this source is definitely unsuitable.
   Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:52, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

I still think that the preponderance of the reliable specialist sources such as the Flag Bulletin by flag specialist Whitney Smith, Laureate and a Fellow of the International Federation of Vexillological Associations, and those you try to deconstruct, based on your notion that Google snipets are not reliable or that Polish experts pick up facts from the Internet etc., point to the fact that Mount Athos has a flag. Now you can try to deconstruct phrases like "Greek yellow" etc. but many of these references are specialist sources and all of them agree that the autonomous state has a flag. By the way, the author of source number 2, William G. Crampton, is William Crampton, a vexillology specialist and founder of the Flag Institute. The point is, there are enough sources and specialist opinions in the sources I have provided to make this discussion moot. If you still disagree, you are free to open an RfC but I am not going to debate at length your attempt at deconstructing some of these reliable sources. Dr. K. 21:34, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

By the way I added another specialist source "The world encyclopedia of flags: the definitive guide to international flags, banners, standards and ensigns" by expert vexillologist, heraldist and journalist Alfred Znamierowski. Hope that's enough. Dr. K. 21:58, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

"Your notion that Polish experts pick up facts from the Internet"? Dr.K., if you are not prepared to read and understand other people's arguments, stay out of this talkpage. As for your new source, the same goes for it as for the previous ones: any source that calls Athos a "Self-governing theocratic republic under Greek protectorate" clearly has no idea what it's talking about. Do you know what a protectorate is? That author clearly doesn't. As for all those Flag Institute sources, the entire field of "vexillology" appears to be a non-academic hobby discipline of self-styled "researchers" with no tangible criteria of academic rigour; just because some of those people have Wikipedia articles doesn't make them reliable academic writers about things they don't know about. Fut.Perf. ☼ 05:02, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

"Your notion that Polish experts pick up facts from the Internet"? Dr.K., if you are not prepared to read and understand other people's arguments, stay out of this talkpage.

Leave your abuse out of this talkpage. Here are your own words:

But where then does Kamusella get his very next sentence from, the one that claims that "The republic adopted the crowned imperial double-headed eagle [...] as its flag? This factoid is not in the Honzák source, nor indeed in any of the other sources quoted, as far as I could check. We can only conclude he got it from somewhere on the Internet – not unlikely, from Wikipedia. Kamusella is a Polish expert, and you said that he got a fact from the Internet. This is exactly the argument I made. I simply did not use Kamusella's name, and also used plural, but that was only as a figure of speech and because I did not expect to be attacked for using some informal argument. You don't have to become abusive because I didn't use surgically accurate language. I thought it was not needed because I thought I was talking to someone who could understand what I was talking about without having to go into excruciating details. I also thought that you would not grab the chance to become abusive. It is the last time I gave you that benefit. Dr. K. 05:28, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

The feeling is reciprocated. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:35, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Now you know why they call it "vexillology". 86.176.19.17 (talk) 10:09, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Dr.K. has provided us with more than enough WP:RELIABLE sources than we could ever need, about the Athonite flag. If anyone here claims the opposite, or wants to contest the Athonite state's flag, then they better provide us with some strong sources instead of wasting valuable time contesting every source about that flag when it could not suit their personal opinions. Thing here is, so far I haven't seen any such sources supporting the opposite. Last, I feel obliged to remind Fut.Perf. that Wikipedia is not based on personal opinions but on sources and facts. Nothing more, nothing less. --SILENTRESIDENT 10:45, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

When this madness is going to end? Future Perfect again removed the sources, this time even the ones he previously didn't challenge as "unreliable". And on top of that, he removed the flag again, even though he clearly has no support for this move. If he keeps up with his WP:TENDENTIOUS edits, I will have no other option but take action against him. --SILENTRESIDENT 14:44, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

For the record, here is the RS noticeboard thread that S.R. started about this matter some weeks ago, and where the only substantial and argued input from outside editors was in agreement with my objections to the sources. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:59, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Very interesting how you dismiss any editors who do not share your opinion, as having "no substantial input", and how you dismiss every reliable source you do not agree with, as "unreliable" even though 4-5 editors on RS Noticeboard found the sources to be falling within WP:RS How comes, dear Future Perfect, in your eyes, only those who agree with you are the only ones who in your eyes count? Strange. --SILENTRESIDENT 15:14, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

I restored the sources. Despite some wishful thinking, RSN did not opine against the sources. I see an RfC coming so editors should have the chance to examine the sources, as was done at RSN. Dr. K. 17:17, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

The barring of women and human rights

The sexist curfew is like interim measures that became permanent by state law, for people of specific sex that didn't commit any crime. Please more data needed on the main article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:587:410E:A400:A114:24C8:8D5C:CD5D (talk) 14:51, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Lead sentence bloat

Some editors have been filling up the lead sentence with multiple foreign-language translations and insist on their reinsertion [3]. This is a typical example of lead bloat and lead-fixation pedantry. There is a very good reason MOS:FORLANG recommends including not more than one foreign translation in this position. Currently, this article has seven alternative strings: one for English pronunciation, three versions of Greek, two of Bulgarian, one of Serbian. Moreover, the whole thing is inconsistent and unprincipled: the Serbian and the Bulgarian versions are exactly identical and thus redundant; the argument that "those are the languages of the monasteries" falls flat because on that account the list is not even complete (if we list Bulgarian and Serbian, why not Russian and Romanian also?) On the whole, the list is useless to the reader. It can't be repeated often enough: we do not include foreign equivalents in the lead as a symbolic badge of recognition of the relevance of this or that national group for a given place. The lead sentence needs to be reserved exclusively to those terms that are actually relevant for English-speaking readers. The single local official name (in this case Greek) is usually relevant in this way because English readers will come across it in some maps and atlasses that print names in their local forms. All other names are relevant only for somewhere further down in a "names" section, or the second paragraph of the lead that deals with naming. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:53, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your edit. It is better structured now and the information is still there. --Petar Petrov (talk) 12:21, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Selective reporting

As a pilgrim heading for Mount Athos, I note that this article:

1: Mentions that Mount Athos was under Hitler's personal protection during World War II,

2: Gives individual detail to two or three women besides the Mother of God who somehow snuck in, and

3: Totally omits mention of the mountain taking and hiding refugees during World War II, including Jewish women and girls (see the OrthodoxWiki article).

If your representation of one of Eastern Orthodoxy's greatest treasures worldwide is going to include the first two points, could we please also particularly include the third?

C.J.S. Hayward

Cjshayward (talk) 21:44, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

"Aftonomi monastiki politeia Agiou Orous"?

Another factual claim we need to scrutinize, while we're at it, is the alleged "official name", Aftonomi monastiki politeia Agiou Orous. This phrase, or variants of it, have been in the article (in the infobox and/or the lead) since September 2006, but were never sourced. The phrase was first inserted by a user named Smith2006 [4][5], with the accompanying wording "Politically, it is known in Greece as...". By the end of 2010 this had morphed into "Its political status in Greece is known as...". It was "fact"-tagged by me in January 2011 [6] and subsequently removed from the intro in February 2011 by a user named Blue-Haired Lawyer [7], though it remained in the infobox. It was reintroduced in the intro paragraph in December 2014 by none other than AuditoreEzio aka SilentResident [8], this time with the explicit claim of it being the "official name". Again, of course, without a source.

The funny thing is that there seems to be virtually no usage at all of this alleged "official name" anywhere on the web. There is certainly no trace of it in those places where you'd expect such an official name to be defined: in the Katastatikos Chartis [9] and in the Greek Constitution [10], nor is it used anywhere on the (semi-official?) Website inathos.gr. Google searches for either the transcription "aftonomi monastiki politeia Agiou Orous" or the Greek "Αὐτόνομη Μοναστικὴ Πολιτεία Ἁγίου Ὄρους" bring up only Wikipedia mirrors and other webpages using some kind of automatic location database. Not a single hit on the web domains where you'd expect the official status of the place to be treated and discussed, like the Greek government domains (.gov.gr) or the pages of the European Union. Zero book hits.

Curiously, the phrase "Aftonomi monastiki politeia" alone, without the "Agiou Orous", is used – though not as a name, but only as a generic description – in recent editions of the CIA Factbook [11]. But it's been there only since 2012; older editions simply said "autonomous region" at that point. (Did CIA copy from Wikipedia? Another interesting candidate for citogenesis.) The Greek Wikipedia calls the description "unofficial" ("ανεπίσημα χαρακτηρίζεται ως «Αυτόνομη Μοναστική Πολιτεία"), and also has no indication of it being the actual name. This [12] Athonite blog explicitly argues against the factual correctness of the description. Again, no search hit showing actual use of the phrase (even as only a generic description) in official writing.

SilentResident, what made you think that phrase is the "official name" of the place? Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:48, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Future Perfect, you do not expect from me to remember the reasoning for old edits that happened years ago? Hence why lately I am using more often the Edit Summary, to aleviate myself from having to remember why I have done the edits in the first place and to let everyone know what I edited and for whatever reason. But still, this is a good question you have asked. I digged abit now the history log and I found that my activity was not exclusively limited to the English Wikipedia's Mount Athos, but also on the Greek Wikipedia's Mount Athos. See here: [13]. I suspect that, 3 years ago, I saw the additional name information on the Greek article and thought it was good idea to add it to the English one? As you probably already know, it is not unusual to borrow missing information from one page to another.

The links of the constitutional chart and the link from the Hellenic Parliament are useful but they are not the answer to the debate. Also while trying to help with finding sources for that name's origin, I have instead stumbled upon sources self-stylizing the autonomous monastic entity as "Ιερά Κοινότητα Αγίου Όρους". Unless someone can help us with concrete proofs of what the actual name for the Holy mountain is, it is better that the "official name" is removed for now from the article and just use the Hellenic Parliament's reference to it for the time being. The Hellenic Parliament's website is the most reliable source when it comes to official information about governing entities within the Greek territory, but still, it is not perfect source as it lacks a clarification of the official name of that state, which, in my opinion at least, is the reason the issue is not resolved just by citing this [14]. --SILENTRESIDENT 07:39, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

What is Mount Athos?

As has been illuminated in the discussion above, there is a discrepancy between the lead sentence and the use of infoboxes in this article. According to WP:BEGIN, "The first sentence should tell the nonspecialist reader what, or who, the subject is." The first sentence in this article reads: "Mount Athos .. is a mountain and peninsula in northeastern Greece and an important centre of Eastern Orthodox monasticism." The conclusion for the "nonspecialist reader" has to be that the subject of the article is a mountain and peninsula. In the second sentence, the reader learns that "It is governed as an autonomous polity within the Greek Republic." For the "nonspecialist reader", the "autonomous polity" is presented as secondary. This would indicate that the main (or first) infobox should be "Infobox Mountain", while the "Infobox Settlement" or similar should be secondary, preferably placed where the autonomous polity is presented.

When I suggested this, however, I managed to stir up rather strong feelings. The gist of the criticism was that most of the article is about the "autonomous polity", not about the "mountain and peninsula". This is, of course, correct, but it does not change the fact that the first sentence defines the mountain and peninsula as the primary subject.

So how to solve this? Well, if Mount Athos will not come to Muhammad... Instead of insisting on putting the infoboxes in their logical place, I will suggest to change the two first sentences in order to lift the "autonomous polity" into the first sentence, thus making it part of the "subject of the article":

"Mount Athos .. is a mountain and peninsula in northeastern Greece, governed as an autonomous polity within the Greek Republic. It is an important centre of Eastern Orthodox monasticism."

Any takers? --T*U (talk) 15:19, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, I see the problem you raise, although I personally don't find the current mismatch severe enough to make a change unavoidable. To me, this is about on a par with the mismatch found in many country articles, where the infobox is primarily about a modern political entity, while the entire article may be about a much older ethnic-geographical concept (such as "Greece", "Germany" or "Italy"). I'd trust readers can see the connection even if the (topmost) infobox corresponds to an aspect mentioned only in the second sentence of the lead. If people feel we need a closer match, I wouldn't object to swapping the infobox positions, as you first suggested. The rewording of the lead sentence you propose above doesn't seem quite satisfactory to me, because I think the bit about "centre of monasticism" should come before "autonomous polity" – after all, the former fact is the reason for the latter. I'm not too fussed about whether these two bits are in one sentence or in two. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:21, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Future Perfect, this is a good point T*U has made here. His later suggestion (to change the two first sentences in order to lift the "autonomous polity" into the first sentence, thus making it part of the "subject of the article"), is way better solution than just swapping the infoboxes, for two obvious reasons: 1) The notability of the Athonite polity is far bigger than the notability of the namesake mountain itself: historically and contemporary, it is the Athonite community and polity that made its mountain notable, not the other way around. 2) The article focuses primarily on the Athonite polity, not on the namesake mountain, with the content about the polity exceeding 80% of the total article's size. I believe if there is a problem on the lead, it is not the infobox type, but how the lead paragraph is worded to reflect on this. A small but careful re-wording of the lead, especially the first couple of sentences, as T*U pointed out, can effectively solve the problem without bringing to the lead an infobox type that cannot reflect on primary key info about the article, while a swap of infoboxes can only cause more problems. Edit: T*U, thanks for bringing WP:BEGIN to our awareness. --SILENTRESIDENT 17:04, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Custom flag caption on Settlement Infobox, is that possible?

Is it possible to use a custom flag caption on Settlement Infobox (i.e. The Greek Orthodox flag, flown at Mount Athos) instead of the automatic text that writes simply the word flag?

From our discussions in the above sections of the talk page, it came to be better idea to switch from Country Infobox to Settlement Infobox, but for some strange reason, the one infobox type does allow custom flag captions, while the other does not. Any particular reason for this? Perhaps am I missing some kind of code not present on Template:Infobox_settlement? Or just the Settlement type of the infobox does not support custom flag captions? --❤ SILENTRESIDENT ❤ 22:57, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

It's just because nobody has bothered to implement such a caption parameter for the Settlement box yet. You can ask them over at the template talk if somebody might be willing to add one. I'm not going to touch it, since it's a humongous template with a huge amount of code, used for a huge range of different things. Maybe one of the reasons why there is no custom caption is that nobody ever conceived of the bizarre possibility that somebody might want to add a flag to an article that needs some hedging/disclaimer because it isn't actually the flag of that place? Just thinking. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:13, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Maybe one of the reasons why there is no custom caption is that nobody ever conceived of the bizarre possibility that somebody might want to add a flag to an article that needs some hedging/disclaimer because it isn't actually the flag of that place? Just thinking. Wishful thinking, Future Perfect. After all, who brought the whole need for custom captions about flags, Future Perfect? Not me or Dr. K, but you. Or did you "forget" that too? But I agree, it is funny, no one in Wikipedia could have imagined that because of our notorious Future Perfect's obsession about byzantine flags, such a code could be in need now. Do me a favor and go away.--❤ SILENTRESIDENT ❤ 10:28, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Request for Comment: Flag on Infobox

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

No consensus for the proposed inclusion--in specific.But simultaneously, there were not any strong grounds to exclude the flag either.Now, that the onus of inclusion is on the editor proposing it, the status quo shall be maintained which means that the flag stays out unless and until a newer RFC on the topic over-rules this consensus.A closure statement could be written if either of the parties deem it necessary.Winged Blades ^Godric 09:56, 13 August 2017 (UTC)Clarified on request at 10:36, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

---

Should the flag used in Mount Athos be at the infobox, given the sources?

Sources:

References

--SILENTRESIDENT 21:19, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

• Support The sources have been scrutinised at RSN and the overall reaction at the noticeboard was positive at best, and non-dismissive at worst, at least in my opinion. Therefore, they form a good basis on which to justify inclusion of the flag at the infobox. Please see also RSN discussion. Dr. K. 22:04, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

You have my thanks, Dr.K. --SILENTRESIDENT 16:19, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose, as explained at leingth above, and at the RS Noticeboard thread. There is no such thing as a flag of Mount Athos. The eagle flag is the flag of the Greek Orthodox Church, and its use on Athos is indistinguishable from its use everywhere else by Orthodox churches in Greece and abroad. The fact that it is flown (also) on Athos makes it no more the "flag of Athos" than it is the "flag of Athens" or the "flag of Thessaloniki", where you can see it flown in the same way. As for the sources, they were scrutinized and every single one of them was found to be bad. They either mention the flag only in passing and without any sign of in-depth analysis of its status and function, or their authors display a clear lack of in-depth knowledge of Athos, as demonstrated by the fact that they (a) plagiarize general information about Athos from encyclopedias, (b) proliferate obviously false information about the political status of Athos (such as the claim that Athos is an "independent state", a "protectorate" or other such nonsense). None of these sources is a reliable source with respect to what counts here: the constitutional order and political status of Athos and of Greece. Dr. K. is seriously misrepresenting the result of the noticeboard thread, where in fact the only substantial, argued input from independent outside observers was clearly in agreement with these objections against the sources. Fut.Perf. ☼ 05:07, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

• Once more, don't make this personal; although, obviously, I'm not planning to make this a race to the bottom of the pit of incivility, so I'll stick to the facts. I said, in my support comment above: The sources have been scrutinised at RSN and the overall reaction at the noticeboard was positive at best, and non-dismissive at worst, at least in my opinion. To me, this sounds, like a reasonable, honest, modest reading of the RSN reaction. You say: Dr. K. is seriously misrepresenting the result of the noticeboard thread, where in fact the only substantial, argued input from independent outside observers was clearly in agreement with these objections against the sources. Which is, as usual, a PA-based, way over the top, self-serving assessment in your favour. But, tragically, you don't seem to understand that all these PAs are entirely unnecessary, because people are smart, and people can read the RSN discussion, and they can arrive at their own conclusions. That's why this RfC has opened. So that the community can render its opinion, immune from your self-serving assessments, and personal attacks. Dr. K. 06:05, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

• Get a grip. It wasn't me who chose to make this personal – you did that, with ad personams and personal insinuations against me in pretty much every single posting of yours ever since you got involved in this discussion. Yes, I stand by my assessment that you are misrepresentig the result of the discussion (there were only three editors that gave substantial comments there; one of whom agreed with you but only provided a wholesale assertion without engaging with any of the arguments; the two others agreed with my criticism.) Nothing in pointing this out is a personal attack, get over it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:16, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

I didn't expect any better response from a chronic NPA violator. Your rude commands Get a grip, get over it, get over yourself indicate your penchant for base, get-based, verbal brutality. Leave these commands for yourself. But, again, people can see through your flimsy and tired attempts at denying your incivility; right down to your use of tired clichés such as get over it and, as usual, abusing edit-summaries with more tired clichés get over yourself. This is your get over (fill in the blank) phase of incivility. Very inventive. Dr. K. 06:30, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I stand by my assessment that you are misrepresentig the result of the discussion... Nobody cares about your biased assessment. Fortunately, this is a wiki and everyone can form their own opinion as to what happened at RSN, without the need to be spoon-fed biased, PA-fueled, assessments. Transparency is my ally. I operate under total wiki-transparency, without PAs and attempts to spoon-feed my opinion to editors, because I respect their intelligence and ability to evaluate a discussion. That's why I bolded the link to the archived discussion at RSN so that editors can easily link to it, read it, and form their own opinion, free from self-serving assessments. Dr. K. 20:02, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose I don't think the country infobox should be included here at all. This is a collection of monasteries with a variety of sui generis legal rules, not a 21st century nation-state. Power~enwiki (talk) 06:44, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

• I don't think so. If you have studied about Athonite history, you could have knew that it is an autonomous religious polity, with its own authorities and monastic institutions, not just "a collection of monasteries with a variety of sui generis legal rules". This is a big difference in my opinion. And I shall remind you that not every autonomous polity in the world has to be "a 21st century nation-state" for it to be considered as such. Vatican and Mount Athos existed as autonomous entities long before the modern invention of the concept of "nation-state". --SILENTRESIDENT 08:08, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

• Yes, it's autonomous, but that doesn't make it a country or even "country-like". Are there any sources that suggest there is a governing organization that functions similarly to Vatican City or the Knights Hospitaller? I believe RS suggest the opposite, and that the government of Greece handles all international affairs. Power~enwiki (talk) 23:13, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

• Did I wrote above that "being autonomous, makes it a country or even country-like"? Of course not. I am pointing out to the fact that a polity doesn't have to be "nation-state" for it to enjoy a high level of autonomy (Athos) or independence (Vatican). There are not many of this kind (religious polities) in the world, but the fact is: they do exist. Please be fair in your responses and don't distort my sayings. If you want to make an argument, at least make valid ones. Of course the infobox won't be removed. All autonomous polities or entities have an infobox, such as Catalonia. Same goes for Mount Athos which was autonomous polity for more than 1.000 years, long before modern Greece declared independence, and still is. I suggest we do not stick on whether there shall be infobox, but whether there shall the flag flown at Athos, and which represents the Athonite authorities, shall be in the infobox which is pretty obvious-turned-not-so-obvious by a certain editor here. Thats why the question of the RfC is: could the infobox have the flag flown at Athos? Yes or no? And yet you opposed the RfC using arguments not relating to the flag and the sources about the flag, but to whether Athos is autonomous polity or "a collection of monasteries with a variety of sui generis legal rules". --SILENTRESIDENT 04:56, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

• I am opposed to the presence of {{infobox country ...}} on the page. It's clear that if the infobox exists, it should have some flag image, and that you have the correct image to use. Power~enwiki (talk) 05:21, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

• Just checked now the article, and you are right, it is using the country type of infobox. This needs to be changed. I looked now on other articles that are about autonomous entities, such as Catalonia, and noticed they are using the Infobox Settlement type. I recommend we do the same here and switch from Country to Settlement type. --SILENTRESIDENT 05:27, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
• Looks like your comment on RfC didn't reflect on the flag but on the infobox. Since this RfC is about the flag, please update us on your position about the flag. I want editors here to only comment about flag here, not about infobox type (which will be corrected) or other matters. --SILENTRESIDENT 05:38, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

• Conditional support switched to Oppose since my "condition" is deemed unacceptable. I am afraid it is not entirely possible to separate the discussion about the flag from the discussion about the infobox. I agree that the infobox should be of the Infobox Settlement type, but I will not support having that infobox with the flag at the top of the article. The lead sentence says that "Mount Athos is a mountain and peninsula..." Mountains do not have flags, nor do peninsulae. Neither do they have a capital, languages etc. The logical thing would be to have the Infobox Mountain at the top. The Settlement infobox can better be placed in the section "Administration and organization". In that case, I will support having the flag. --T*U (talk) 18:24, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
  • Apparently you do not know much about Athos, do you? Mount Athos isn't simply a geographical mountain but a self-governed region of same name, according to the constitution of Greece (note in italics text - is important - it is a polity). The article, I am afraid, is not just about the geographic mountain of Athos (which is covered accordingly in the "Geography" section) but also about the administration, its culture, its history, institutions, governance and more. As you can easily understand, you can't have the geography infobox take precedence over the Settlement infobox in the lead of the article, when the Geography part constitutes only a little part of the article and Mount Athos is not just a geographical name but also a regional name. According to the constitution of Greece, Mount Athos (the "Monastic State of Agion Oros") is, "following ancient privilege", "a self-governed part of the Greek State, whose sovereignty thereon shall remain intact", and consists of 20 main monasteries which constitute the Holy Community, and the capital town and administrative centre, Karyes, also home to a governor as the representative of the Greek state. I am afraid, dear TU-nor, we can't just look at the tree and simply ignore the forest. So please, stick to the discussion of the RfC whether the flag belongs to the Infobox (which will be Settlement type as stated above in my reply to Power~enwiki) or not. As simple as that.

Edit: still about the Geography Infobox argument you used - I could like to point out to some nice examples of how infobox cases were handled across Wikipedia where the political boundaries of entities/polities coincide with the geographical ones: such as Cyprus, both an island country and geographical area, and Catalonia, both a self-governed region and geographical area. In both cases, and for obvious reasons which I expect that you could have already figured by yourself - use either the Country (if it is country) or the Settlement (if it is a region) infoboxes. None of them uses Geography Infobox even though their articles cover their respective geographies as well. Just a little WP:COMMONSENSE about infoboxes doesn't hurt. - --SILENTRESIDENT 19:24, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Please don't patronise me; actually I know quite a lot about Athos. Also please don't misquote me; I have not said that the article is "just about the geographic mountain of Athos". My simple point is that while the article about Cyprus starts with "Cyprus ... is an island country" and the one about Catalonia with "Catalonia ... is an autonomous community", thisarticle starts with "Mount Athos ... is a mountain and peninsula". In this article, geography comes first. --T*U (talk) 21:28, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

TU-nor, if your interest here isn't the RfC but to nitpick on infobox on faulty grounds that "The X infobox should be used instead of Y infobox because the lead begins with the X word instead of Y word", then I can't really help you at all, but point you to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Infoboxes which states: "An infobox [...] summarizes key features of the page's subject." Not trying to patronise you about the article, but unless my eyes are deceiving me, the vast majority of the page's content here, is about the monastic state of Holy Mountain and its history, not about the geographical mountain itself which is of little interest except the fact that it hosts the monasteries. (As a matter of fact, the Geography section consists only a very small portion of the article and clearly the Geography Infobox can't exactly summarize key features of the entire page's subject). I am sorry but don't expect (at least me) to consent to such a request. Have a good day. --SILENTRESIDENT 04:49, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

You are grossly misrepresenting what I have stated. 1) I have not suggested to use one infobox instead of another, I have just suggested another placement of the two infoboxes present. 2) My argument is not the use of one word instead of another in the lead, but about what the lead sentence describes as the subject of the article. Anyway: Since the proposer of the RfC insists that the infoboxes are not to be discussed, just the flag, I have no other option than to change my !vote from "Conditional support" to "Oppose". --T*U (talk) 06:17, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

TU-nor, of course you haven't suggested the use of one infobox instead of another, and I don't know how it came you thought that I "grossly misrepresented" your statement as such. Please read more carefully my previous response to you: "you can't have the geography infobox take precedence over the Settlement infobox in the lead of the article, when the Geography part constitutes only a little part of the article and Mount Athos is not just a geographical name but also a regional name.". This is what I replied to you. As you see, when I said take precedence in my reply to you, I didn't "grossly misrepresent" it as meaning replace. A big difference if you ask me. Please refrain from accusing others for misrepresenting your statements as this is not the first time you have made such accusations against others.

As for your position change from conditional support to oppose, I feel obliged point out to how your statement still is lacking even after updating your position: You wrote: "The lead sentence says that "Mount Athos is a mountain and peninsula..." Mountains do not have flags, nor do peninsulae. Neither do they have a capital, languages etc.". The logical thing would be to have the Infobox Mountain at the top. The Settlement infobox can better be placed in the section "Administration and organization". In that case, I will support having the flag."

However, what you wrote, only reflects on geographical Athos and not on the Athonite polity. And mind you on what you said about: My simple point is that while the article about Cyprus starts with "Cyprus ... is an island country" and the one about Catalonia with "Catalonia ... is an autonomous community", the Athonite peninsula is constituting the region of Athos. As per Article 105 of the Greek Constitution: [15]. "The Athos peninsula extending beyond Megali Vigla and constituting the region of Aghion Oros shall, in accordance with its ancient privileged status, be a self-governed part of the Greek State."

So, TU-nor, to concluse, we can not talk here only about the geographical Athos and ignore the Athonite polity. Nor we can ignore that the geographical peninsula of Mount Athos is constituting the territory of the Athonite polity in the first place. Furthermore, you have asked for Geography infobox to be on the lead even though only 10%-15% of the article's content being about geographical Athos, with the rest 85% to 90% being about the Athonite polity. And the fact that you have set the Geography Infobox as precondition for your support to the flag on Settlement infobox, makes your whole position on the RfC more questionable. I am sorry but I firmly disagree with such approaches on RfCs. Edit: and if your position (or how I understood it) is not what you meant but a misunderstanding of mine, then I apologize in advance. --SILENTRESIDENT 08:09, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Quote: to nitpick on infobox on faulty grounds that "The X infobox should be used instead of Y infobox. That is how I came to think that you meant that I "suggested the use of one infobox instead of another". How could I not? --T*U (talk) 09:09, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Didn't you ask for the Geography infobox to be on the Lead section instead of the Settlement infobox? Didnt you asked for the Settlement to be moved to Administration section? I replied to you in that context about the lead infobox. "The X infobox should be used instead of Y infobox". And again, I explained that the Geography is only a small part of the article, not the primary or sole focus of the article that could justify such an infobox type on the lead. If it was, I mean, if the article wasnt about the Athonite polity at all, or was more about mere geography, I ensure you I could have totally supported your request for a Geography infobox on lead. I could be more than happy to support your request. --SILENTRESIDENT 09:24, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

If you still maintain that my interest here is to nitpick on infobox on faulty grounds, there is not much point in elaborating on my posistion. Whatever happened to WP:AGF? I think I am finished here. --T*U (talk) 11:26, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

TU-nor, your statement wasn't about the RfC's question but about infoboxes types. Yet, despite me taking the time and explaining to you the faulty ground of your arguments, you insisted on changing the lead's infobox based on some... wording on the lead paragraph(!) instead of taking in account the whole article and its content. Furthermore, I am very displeased with you conditioning your support to the RfC to your request for changing the infobox type. I am very sorry but I failed to see how this contributes positively to the RfC. I wasn't forced to reply to you, since this isn't my problem but yours, yet I did because this was unusual to expect from you, a well-renowned editor. But since you did, I cannot help but question the purpose of this proposed trade off. It was unfortunate but saw this as nitpicking. I am sorry if I offended you but you aren't helping the situation. Btw, you have expressed your wonder about what happened to WP:AGF but it is not a coincidence that I was wondering the same thing for quite a long time now. Shall I remind you it wasn't the first time you have accused others for "misrepresentation" of your sayings. Remember in Tourism in Greece? Really I will need be more careful when replying to you from now and on. Indeed how much I miss AGF. --SILENTRESIDENT 12:11, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

• Additional comment If the consensus turns out to be in favour of keeping the flag in the infobox, I support the suggested wording by SilentResident so as not to call it the "Flag of Mount Athos". --T*U (talk) 18:23, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

You have my thanks, T*U. --SILENTRESIDENT 11:00, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

• I remain unconvinced, for the reasons mentioned in the previous RFC, that the flag in question has any special affinity to Mount Athos per se, rather than the Greek Orthodox Church in general. Unless other and better sources are found, I am therefore strongly opposed to any inclusion in the article with a phrasing that implies that this flag is the "Flag of Mount Athos", or that it has any official status. I would accept an inclusion that makes clear that this is the flag of the Greek Orthodox Church, and therefore is commonly flown in the peninsula (as, indeed in most Greek churches). In that case, the flag would be essentially decorative since there is no unique or specific association with Athos. Inevitably, it also follows that it should preferably not be placed in the infobox, as it is not really representative of Athos specifically (and, lest we forget, there are not only Greek Orthodox monasteries on the peninsula), any more than the Flag of Greece is. PS, quite a few acquaintances who have been on Athos tell me that the monks are quite tech-savvy. Perhaps an enquiry to them might be more fruitful than wrangling about the validity of foreign sources? A primary source is better than unreliable second- and third-party ones. Constantine ✍ 20:17, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Comment: Kostas, last time, you had said at RSN: I think that the flag is used in at least semi-official capacity (especially because the monks probably consider it to have been truly the flag of the Byzantine Empire), but would prefer a simple description on the lines of "Flag of the GOC, commonly used throughout Athos", rather than attribute to it a status that is uncertain., which is a bit more affirmative as to its connection to Athos. Dr. K. 20:40, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Exactly. And if I may add - the caption of the flag in the infobox doesn't have necessarily to write "Flag of Mount Athos". Of course it can write something like "Flag of the GOC, commonly used throughout Athos" as a compromise that takes everyone else's concerns on this matter. However I shall remind everyone here that the RfC here is about whether the flag should be in the infobox, not about captions or infobox types - these can be agreed upon. The RfC is about whether the flag has place in the infobox or not. And I think everyone here cannot deny the indisputable fact about the flag being chosen by the Athonite authorities as the one that can flow across the Athonite polity's territory. --SILENTRESIDENT 21:00, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

@Dr.K.: By "semi-official" I meant precisely that it is used, and has a certain official capacity (as the flag of the GOC and the presumed flag of Byzantium), but not that it is specifically linked to Mount Athos. As I wrote at the previous discussion and here as well, I have no problem with its inclusion in the article, as long as it is not made out to be official. The wording suggested by SilentResident works fine for me. Constantine ✍ 10:52, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Kostas for the clarification. Dr. K. 14:34, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

You have my thanks, Constantine. --SILENTRESIDENT 11:00, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

• Support inclusion of the flag in the infobox. While it is not the "flag of mount athos" per se, it is ubiquitous in the peninsula, it flies outside the monastic council building in karyes and it is on official documents issued by the monastic community. As such it is strongly associated with Mount Athos and it is not misleading to our readers to include here. Khirurg (talk) 21:23, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

You have my thanks, Khirurg. --SILENTRESIDENT 09:46, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

• Support (Summoned by bot) The sources support it. Even if it is not official, its connection is strong enough (I feel) to be included. L3X1 (distænt write) )evidence( 13:20, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

You have my thanks, L3X1. --SILENTRESIDENT 16:09, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose inclusion of the flag in the infobox. Even supporters say "While it is not the "flag of mount athos" per se, it is ubiquitous in the peninsula". If the NATO flag flies in East Anglia, does that make it the flag of East Anglia? There are innumerable Orthodox places of worship where this flag is used, it may be more common at Athos, so what? Pincrete (talk) 18:26, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

While I'm flattered that you chose to quote me, you did so selectively. Did you read the rest of what I wrote? Khirurg (talk) 18:30, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I am saddened, Pincrete, as this is a poor argument you have used here. Obviously, if you know about NATO and Athos, then you should know that the NATO flag for East Anglia and the GOC flag for Mount Athos are not even comparable cases The NATO flag isn't used in any official events at East Anglia except military ones, nor is flown in every one of the public buildings in East Anglia (even less in offices, and almost never in private spaces, I am afraid), nor does NATO's logo which symbolizes unity, is present in any of East Anglican documents and papers (excluding NATO papers obviously), nor the region of East Anglia itself is directly associated with the NATO organization in any way other than just being the territory of a NATO member state. Contrary, the GOC flag and its Double-head eagle logo are present in the Athonite documents, papers and stamps, and is used as the emblem of the Athonite authorities. Furthermore, the flag is flown in all the Athonite public spaces, offices and in some cases even private spaces across the monastic entity's territory. As you can see, we have two completely different flags here: the one flag is associated with Athonite community, while the other isn't associated with the East Anglican community. Since Wikipedia has to reflect on reality and facts, I find the argument you have used to oppose the RfC as rather problematic as it is ignoring these facts. Have a good day. --SILENTRESIDENT 20:26, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Whatever analogy you deem appropriate, it is not the flag of Mount Athos, end of discussion. It DOES have (spiritual) authority within Orthodoxy, it has no temporal authority anywhere AFAIK. Yes of course I read what you wrote Khirurg, it's simply that irrespective of how many places fly this flag, it doesn't make it the Athos flag. Pincrete (talk) 21:06, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

And if you look closely in the infobox, below the disclaimer it says "The Greek Orthodox flag, flown at Mount Athos." Nothing wrong with that. By the way your analogy with East Anglia is a non-starter. East Anglia is not a one-of-a-kind autonomous monastic polity. Mount Athos is one of a kind, analogies are completely meaningless here. Khirurg (talk) 22:04, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Exactly - the caption proposed for the flag, "The Greek Orthodox flag, flown at Mount Athos.", is a good proposal made by Constantine above which takes in account such possible concerns; if Pincrete's concerns are about the flag being presented here in a misleading way as being "The Official Flag of Athos" or something like that, then he should read the discussion above with Constantine as this isn't the case at all. People should read the discussion in RfC before commenting. At least this is what I do. --SILENTRESIDENT 05:16, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Whatever analogy is proposed, you aren't going to be happy, but this is not the flag of Mount Athos, it is the flag of the spiritual authority which Athos is part of. Putting the 'textual disclaimer' is just confusing IMO. Until one understands the whole temporal/spiritual position, it is simply misleading, especially in a geographical/settlement infobox - "this isn't the flag of this place, but we put it here anyhow because these monks' religious affiliation is to this entity and it's flown a lot here". In temporal terms, Athos has a 'special status' within Greece and has no flag of its own. Pincrete (talk) 06:18, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Hmmm... Pincrete, first you have erroneously analogized the GOC flag with NATO's flag. And now you are stating that "this isn't the flag of this place, but we put it here anyhow because these monks' religious affiliation is to this entity". To make such a statement, is to claim that the flag is flown in Athos "because of the monks' personal affiliation is to the Athonite entity". I never heard such a ridiculous statement like this before. It is very worrysome to hear from you that the flag isn't associated with the Athonite authorities, because this is contracted by the facts and the sources; the GOC flag is present in all the offices of the Athonite authorities as well as the monastic Council in Karyes.

To claim now such a thing, right after your failed analogy with NATO, only signals your ignorance about Mount Athos. May I ask if your statement is just your personal opinion on the matter or if you do you have any sources to show us, that can support your claims? I could appreciate if can you share with us any sources that support your claims. Wikipedia editors need to be careful when making such statements, allegations, and theories not backed by sources or are not facts, because they can constitute WP:OR and can harm not only the RfC, but the project as well. --SILENTRESIDENT 08:44, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Nobody said that the flag is not associated with Athos, nobody said anybody's affiliation to orthodoxy was personal, clearly it is a collective affiliation. My wife is Greek, there are numerous places near her 'home' where exactly the same flag is flown. Are those monasteries/churches also part of the Athonite entity? Clearly not, they are all using the flag to signal a religious affiliation much as any religious place might do. In the case of Athos it additionally has a 'special status' within Greece, and the flag might be more omni-present, but whatever way you re-argue things, this is not the flag of Athos, it is a flag used at Athos to signal the specific religious character of the place.

I've given my reasons in response to the RfC, I haven't seen a single source above that says this has any official status as the flag of Athos (as opposed to being used at Athos and other places, which is what the - fairly poor sources - say). Clearly this is an RfC where only 'approved' comments are requested, rather than those based on reading the sources and the discussion. Even those voting to support you say this is not the flag of Athos. My logic is very simple, not the flag of Athos=not in the infobox. By all means in the text if sources support saying that it is widely flown there. Pincrete (talk) 16:53, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

• We are going into circles again, aren't we?
• You said: My wife is Greek, there are numerous places near her 'home' where exactly the same flag is flown. My answer: Well I am happy for your marriage to a Greek woman but I can't see how this validates your claims as an editor. Having a Greek wife yourself living in places where the flag is flown nearby, doesn't make your arguments more valid. Nor does the fact that I have visited Athos and know alot about Athonite history and affairs do validate my own arguments. Hence why you wont find me arguing that "I have been to Athos" in the Request For Comment. WP:OR is quite clear on this.
• You said: this is not the flag of Athos, it is a flag used at Athos to signal the specific religious character of the place. First a failed NATO analogy, then a failure of understanding Athos, and now pretend that you haven't understood what the RfC is about? Have you read our conversation with Constantine at least? How many times do I have to repeat that Athos doesn't have any official flags on its own? The flag is of the Greek Orthodox Church, part of which (religiously affiliated) are the authorities that run the religious entity of Athos. Simple as that. The RfC isn't about it being the official flag of Athos. The RfC is about the flag used in Athos. None here ever claimed that Athos has an official flag that belongs to it. None. The RfC is about the flag in Athos having place in the Infobox, not about the flag being of Athos. Apparently you are leaving me no other option but to clarify this on the RfC question at the beginning of this talk section, because I am tired of saying the same and same thing over again and again. - Done. the RfC question has been clarified to avoid future problems like this. Changed the RfC question from "Should the flag used of Mount Athos be at the infobox, given the sources?" into "Should the flag used in Mount Athos be at the infobox, given the sources?" Does that help now? I really hope it does, because the RfC's question isn't about the status of flag in Athos at all. PS: if I wanted the RfC to be about the flag's status, then I could have asked something like that: "Is the flag flown in Mount Athos, official, given the sources?" instead.
• You said: I haven't seen a single source above that says this has any official status as the flag of Athos. My response: none here has said or claimed that the Greek Orthodox Church's flag has official status in the Athonite polity. Nor I did. Did I? Of course no. I never claimed such a false thing like the flag having official status in Athos. For the flag to gain official status, we need constitutional changes first of all. Such as Article ammendments of the Greek Constitution. The Request For Comment here isnt about adding an official flag to Athos infobox. Is about adding the flag the regional authorities use to the infobox of the article about the Athonite region. Simple as that. Am I clear? Of course I am. Please it is time for you to distinguish the term official from the term used, as these two are totally different terms. I repeat: my RfC is about the flag in the autonomous entity, the one the Athonite authorities use. If we are to not allow the flag to be used in the infobox of the autonomous entity of Athos, and go with your problematic rationale, then the same should be done for the Greek Orthodox Church, which too is using the same flag for its churches and monasteries, offices, and metropolises. And by the way, the position of those here who ask for the flag to not be present in the infobox on the grounds that the flag isn't official, is not supported by any Wikipedia rules. Wikipedia, as per WP:Manual of Style: Flags permits the articles about regions the display of flags in their infoboxes, as long as they are relevant to them. Even if the RfC here was about the flag's official status in that region, it should still be added to Athos' infobox due to relevancy.
• You said: Clearly this is an RfC where only 'approved' comments are requested. I am afraid it is not about your comment being approved by me. This is RfC, and everyone can post here. But you do not expect from me to sit back and not respond to arguments I find - in my own view - to be unaccurate. I don't know why you had this impression but this ain't happening.
• You said: Even those voting to support you say this is not the flag of Athos. They supported me because my RfC is about a flag used in Athos, not about a flag of Athos and because I never claimed the flag to be the official flag of Athos. And to leave no room for misunderstandings in the future, I clarified the RfC question as explained above. At least I hope this helps because I hate repeating myself again and again. --SILENTRESIDENT 18:37, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

The convention on WP articles is that flags are in the article only where they have some recognised status as the flag OF the place, rather than denoting religious, or some other affiliation of those in the place. A reader will inevitably understand the flag in this way, or be confused. Most people in Eng countries barely understand what Gk orthodoxy is, even those familiar with RC and Pr churches, but you are asking them to understand why the 'religious affiliation' flag is the first thing they see in an article about a place. The proper place to 'lay out' the idiosyncratic status of Athos and its relationship to both Greece and the Gk Orthodox church, is in the text, not by 'planting a flag' in the infobox. I respect that those who disagree here probably think that the relationship between Athos and Gk Orthodoxy is strong enough to justify the inclusion, I don't. I think it's simply confusing and slightly inappropriate in a - fundamentally neutral - encyc. Pincrete (talk) 09:00, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

• The convention on WP articles is that flags are in the article only where they have some recognised status as the flag OF the place, rather than denoting religious, or some other affiliation of those in the place. You are contradicting yourself here. While you do seem to recognize that Athos is a unique region and a religious -not civic- polity, you are trying to condition the flags in infobox based on civic criteria and not on whether it is directly relevant. Wikipedia hasn't specified what kind of direct relevancy a flag has to have to a region or for regional polities, but it is logical to assume that for religious self-governed regions, religious flags are chosen to represent them. I don't know for you, but to me it is clear that if this article is about a religious polity, which is represented by a religious flag, the flag to be displayed on the infobox for that religious polity due to direct relevance. It isn't a matter of civic criteria but a matter of relevancy. Sure, if the Athonite polity wasn't a religious polity and rather a civic one, a normal one like East Anglia, or Catalonia or Attica, Peloponnese, or Macedonia, a regular administrative region that has towns and cities instead of monasteries, then I could wholeheartedly have supported you on this. --SILENTRESIDENT 10:55, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
• Hi Pincrete, welcome to the wonderful world of editing Greek topics. May I suggest that it's probably not worth engaging in more give-and-take with this particular user. As you can see above, we've all had to endure the same kind of logorrhoea from them. This person here has decided they are going to keep the last word on anything said on this page, and so they will, no matter how often you attempt to put them right. The blather just won't stop. You've expressed your views quite appropriately; rest assured that anybody who ever will understand them has understood them by now. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:19, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

• Future Perfect, You may think that you can fool Pincrete by playing the role of the nice guy who wants to save them from my logorrhoea, and perhaps you may believe that this will work as to draw away attention from your failures, but we know you better than you think. Have you forgotten these old days where several users across Wikipedia accused you for abuse and misuse of admin privileges? Well I don't. Remember how you nearly entered the List of Former Admins? I am sure you do not want to risk this again, so please leave your WP:PA aside and comment about the discussion, not me. --SILENTRESIDENT 13:57, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

• SR, please don't repeat this crap. No use for warnings either. They never go far. Terms directed at you and ending in -rhoea, are just verbal diarrhoea. Just steer clear. Dr. K. 01:19, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

You are right, and it is not even worth responding to these. --SILENTRESIDENT 10:05, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

• support With great respect for Fut Perfect, the content is sourced, and while I understand an respect his reasoning, his reasoning is not a contrary source. WP:NOTTRUTH. Beyond that my town has a flag, my county has a flag, my state has a flag, hell my neighborhood has a flag. Mt Athos does not need to be "a [nation] state" to have a flag, and its entirely reasonable that an area dedicated to religion uses the flag of that religion as their flag. ResultingConstant (talk) 14:54, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

• You have my thanks, ResultingConstant. I agree and I believe Wikipedia should respect the choice of the Athonites to their flag, and have the article reflect on that indisputable fact, not on Fut.Perf's personal views and theories. --SILENTRESIDENT 16:58, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

• Support: The use of the specific flag is supported by a variety of sources and warrants inclusion.Alexikoua (talk) 10:56, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

• You have my thanks, Alexikoua. --❤ SILENTRESIDENT ❤ 12:49, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Note: Closure requested at WP:RfCl [16]. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:42, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Sources, once more, for the record

Since somebody has again started edit-warring about removing the "unreliable sources" tags, and since some editors still !vote here on the mistaken impression that there is reliable sourcing for that flag, I'll repeat it once more, for the record: every single one of the sources currently in the article (and listed at the top of this RfC) has been proven to be bad, so every single one of them will ultimately be removed from the article. This is not open to further debate. The claim that they were endorsed in the WP:RSN thread last month is little more than a lie; they were not. In detail:

1. Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe: scholarly work, but Athos is outside its topic and outside the author's expertise. Merely a footnote, whose contents are demonstrably copied from low-quality general sources, including several obvious factual errors about the history and status of Athos ("...declared its independence as a monastic republic under Greece's protection"; copied near-verbatim from a general-public encyclopedia that calls Athos a "protectorate"). No sourcing or further substantiation for the claim about the flag.
2. The Flag Bulletin: Journal of some amateur (non-academic) flag society; but not a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Article demonstrably draws its main information about the history and status of Athos from a general-purpose encyclopedia, which it plagiarizes (near-verbatim). Plagiarized, copyright-violating sources are obviously unsuitable and must not be linked to under any circumstances. Its information about the flag appears to be based solely from impressionistic observations such as that "During the millennial celebration of Mount Athos, it was often possible to see this flag flying...", as if the author only had a random collection of photographs to take his information from.
3. Vitali Vitaliev, Little is the light: A booklet of a journalist's personal travel memories that mentions the flag only in passing in a half-sentence, relating how the author once saw it flying over a building in Karyes. No indication that he put any further effort in researching its role and status beyond just that. Author has an ideological agenda of (mis-)representing Athos as an independent country (the entire premise is about presenting Athos as part of a group of European "mini-states" such as Andorra or Liechtenstein, presented as "surviving pockets of freedom"), so he'd have an obvious incentive to (mis)interpret the flag he saw as a "state flag".
4. William G. Crampton, The Complete Guide to Flags: Work by a self-styled amateur "researcher" on flags, mentions Athos only in passing, no substantiation or sourcing; only cited in an ungrammatically garbled Google snippet that doesn't even make any sense ("Greek Yellow [sic] with a 2-headed Orthodox black eagle (also for Mount Church Athos [sic]")
5. Alfred Znamierowski The world encyclopedia of flags: another work by an amateur flag "researcher", another work including obvious and blatant errors about the history and political status of Athos ("theocratic republic under Greek protectorate"). Sources that evidently don't even know what Athos is are obviously not reliable about whether it has a flag either.

These sources will go out, end of discussion. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:34, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Future Perfect, I strongly advice you against the removal of sources as you do not have any consensus for this. And please, we are not stupid, no need for you to repeat your views on the sources to us. Your position was crystal-clear to us from the beginning already, but the people are smarter than that, and they can read the sources, the Reliable Source Noticeboard and the Talk page discussions and make their own conclusions. So far the majority didn't share your views on them. Pointless to say, the instant you try to remove the sources without any WP:CONSENSUS, your edits will be reverted, you will be reported, and likely be blocked for disruption. I suggest that you, either open a dispute resolution, or drop the stick and back away. And please, stick to the discussion. The RfC here isn't about the removal of sources, but about the flag in the infobox. Do not expect from me to sit down and argue with you indefinitely about whether the sources are reliable, because it is clear that you won't make up your opinion on this, nor I intend to. --❤ SILENTRESIDENT ❤ 12:47, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

By all means, report me, wherever you wish. I'm going to start removing the worst sources tomorrow. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:56, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

And just in case, because Future Perfect is trying to decide what RSN did not decide based on his own opinion, I am transcripting here the entire discussion at RSN so that any interested editors can make up their minds about the opinions expressed by uninvolved editors at RSN regarding the sources. The link to the discussion is here:

Mount Athos's Flag

Is the following reliably sourced?

Article

Mount Athos (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Sources

Content

Flag of Mount Athos

Difference

[17] [18]

References

--SILENTRESIDENT 20:25, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

They look fine to me—is there a particular concern you have? One only has to look at any photo taken in Mount Athos to see that they use the Flag of the Greek Orthodox Church (which is the flag being described here) as their flag. ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your response, this is exactly what I expected. The reason I came here to request your opinion is because a certain editor is abusing the said article to have both the flag and the sources contested and removed, despite our desperate efforts to reason with him and convince him that his personal opinions (that this is not Athos' flag) are irrelevant to Wikipedia, and that we need to stick to the sources (like the ones provided above which describe it as the flag of Athos) and to facts (like the photo which you provided which proves the indisputable fact that the Athonite people use it as their flag, alongside the country's flag). Since you asked, my concern is exactly that: the user is trying to remove the sources and the flag. But I dont want to say more as this Noticeboard is not about other editor's behavior, right? --SILENTRESIDENT 20:53, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) They look fine to me as well, thank you Iridescent. The problem is, another user has taken upon himself to deconstruct three out of these five sources. Please see also this section on the talkpage. Dr. K. 21:00, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Let's not be coy: "a certain editor" is FutPerf. In "Unreliable sources", FutPerf argues for their unreliability, I think rather convincingly. There's more than a little exasperation on both sides of the argument; but if we put annoyance and frustration aside, FutPerf makes some good points. -- Hoary (talk) 22:25, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Let's not make this personal by throwing adjectives around. I have provided the links that make it abundantly clear who the participants are. I simply don't see the reason for referring to people personally. This discussion is about sources and arguments for or against them. Names are of no importance. Dr. K. 23:13, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

You're right in that this discussion is about sources and arguments for or against their use. And names are of no importance; but the linked mention of a name serves to alert that person to the existence of a discussion. -- Hoary (talk) 23:22, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

There was no attempt to hide the matter from any of the participants. A resolution at RSN cannot be hidden. The results of this discussion would have to be distributed to all involved parties, so that an agreement can be reached. In any case, I didn't check SR's notification to the other party, but I wasn't particularly worried about the eventual notification. Dr. K. 23:44, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Iridescent: This is outside the purview of this RS board, as it's an argument not about the sources but about the prima face plausibility of the claim as such, but I still don't like to leave this argument uncontrodicted. You only have to look at any photo taken in Washington D.C. to see that they use the Star-Spangled Banner. Does that make the Star-Spangled Banner the flag of Washington D.C.? No, of course it doesn't; it's the flag of a larger entity, of which Washington D.C. happens to be a part. "Flag used in X" is not the same as "Flag of X". The Byzantine Eagle is the flag of the Greek Orthodox church, and it is used on Mount Athos not more and not less and in no different fashion than by every other Greek Orthodox church, diocese, monastery or other institution elsewhere. You can find these flags flown in front of pretty much any church in Greece. The point here is that some people (both Wikipedia editors and authors out there are proliferating a POV falsehood: that Mount Athos is a "state" (and as such, can be expected to have a state flag). It isn't a state, and thus there is no reason to expect it has one. State flags are typically defined by law; there is no legislation of that sort for Athos. – Now that we've clarified the issue, we can resume scrutinizing the sources; I've explained why I consider them unreliable on the article talkpage. Fut.Perf. ☼ 04:51, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

P.S. By the way, @Iridescent: was it deliberate that when you wanted to illustrate "any photo taken in Mount Athos" above, you chose a photo that wasn't actually taken in Athos, but in Rhodes? I could accuse you of falsification of data, but it doesn't really matter. Of course, that photo could have been taken on Athos. But that only goes to prove my point: usage of that flag on Athos is exactly indistinguishable from its usage everywhere else in Greece and in the Greek orthodox world at large. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:31, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Flags are not used only by states. They are also used by autonomous polities. Mount Athos is an autonomous polity, and according to reliable sources, many written by academics with articles on Wikipedia, the autonomous area has a flag. That should be the end of it. Allegations of outside authors and Wikipedia editors proliferating statehood for Mount Athos are baseless and gratuitous personal attacks. Mount Athos does not have to be a state to have a flag; as this list shows, that's a fallacious argument. Some of the sources may not be as strong as some of the others, granted, but there are are enough left over to support the existence of the flag for the autonomous polity of Mount Athos. Dr. K. 05:40, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

Future Perfect, I am baffled by your argument that only the states can have a flag displayed on Wikipedia but the autonomous and self-governed polities not. If we go with your logic, then the flags in many articles will have to take down just because their articles are not about states and not all flags are defined by laws. This is, like how Dr.K. has said, a very very fallacious argument and I couldn't find me disagreeing more than ever. --SILENTRESIDENT 05:56, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The Greek Orthodox Church also has the same flag and we all know that the Greek Orthodox Church is not a state, neither are editors on Wikipedia promoting statehood for the Greek Orthodox Church when they mention that it has a flag. Dr. K. 06:00, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

You have, again, failed to take in the argument. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:18, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

No, you have failed to understand that I have rebutted your allegation The point here is that some people (both Wikipedia editors and authors out there are proliferating a POV falsehood: that Mount Athos is a "state" (and as such, can be expected to have a state flag). and proved that it is useless. Dr. K. 06:22, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

I think it is YOU who has failed to take in the argument. The Holy Mountain existed as a religious community for nearly 2 millenias and its flag has been flying there AT LEAST (note the word "at least" because I do not have knowledge of earlier use than this) since Mount Athos' annexation by Greece, 100 years ago. The old album photos from 1940s from my grandfather who was in Athos, clearly depict the flag flown alone (without Greece's flag) in the Athonite territory during the Nazi German occupation of Greece. I am surprised how it can all of sudden be contested by an editor who probably wasn't even born back then, when even newer entities or organizations, or proto-states, (yes, even proto-states, including the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant whose the "laws" are not really laws) haven't had their flag contested. You are not helping, Future Perfect. --SILENTRESIDENT 06:30, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

"Baseless"? It is no coincidence that several of the authors who claim that Athos has a flag (in one case, explicitly calling it a "state flag") are also making those exact false allegations about its political status (such as claiming it declared "independence" or that it is a Greek "protectorate"). Do you find those falsehoods trivial? I don't; they display a very fundamental misunderstanding of what Athos is. It's also no coincidence that the editors who kept pushing the flag in this article have also been the same editors that kept pushing fictitious "official names" including the word "state" or "republic" into it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:35, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

It's also no coincidence that the editors who kept pushing the flag in this article have also been the same editors that kept pushing fictitious "official names" including the word "state" or "republic" into it. I think you betray a fundamental misunderstanding of WP:RS and WP:V. I did not "push" anything. I found RS which use these terms and I quoted them. You don't get to use PAs against me for bringing RS to the fore that use these terms and which you happen to disagree with. Your dismissal of RS with PAs is indicative of your POV and OR. Dr. K. 06:43, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

You display a fundamental misunderstanding of WP:V and WP:OR. WP:V is not a suicide pact. There's a reason we threw the infamous slogan "verifiability, not truth" out of the text some time ago. It is not "OR" to use our own critical judgment to assess the correctness of sources in talk. (What would be OR would be if I were to start arguing against them in the article). I'm going to ask you two questions and I'll ask for clear yes-or-no answers: (1) Do you, yes or no, deny that calling Mount Athos an "independent state" or a "protectorate" is an obvious, blatant falsehood? (2) Do you, yes or no, deny that any source that includes such a falsehood has ipso facto disqualified itself as a reliable source on matters related to it, such as the status of political symbols? Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:58, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

You display a fundamental misunderstanding of WP:V and WP:OR. WP:V is not a suicide pact. You keep trying to attack me with these nonsense statements. You have nothing to teach me. As my record of producing quality articles shows, I know damn well how to find and use RS. I am currently at RSN because I want to examine the sources, since the flag area is not my specialty. If the sources make statements not supported by facts then I have no problem to reject them. However, calling Athos a "protectorate" or some other term not absolutely technically correct, should not disqualify a source immediately if the question is about the flag itself and not the exactness of the term describing the polity. However, if the editors at RSN don't agree with my position, I have no problem agreeing that the source should be dropped. Your problem is that you use PAs as soon as people don't agree with your dogma and to add insult to injury you are hellbent implying that I try to "push" these terms, which is clearly your heavy-handed method of trying to attack editors you disagree with, as your long record of documented incivility clearly shows. Dr. K. 07:17, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

"It's also no coincidence that the editors who kept pushing the flag in this article have also been the same editors that kept pushing fictitious "official names" including the word "state" or "republic" into it." Future Perfect, you are dangerously crossing the defamation lines here and my patience with you won't last for long. What you call "pushing fictitious", was Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, go open a different discussion. Here, we are discussing about the flag and only the flag. --SILENTRESIDENT 06:50, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

Athos monastic state gets 29,600 Gbook results. So much for the "fictitious" allegations leveled above. Dr. K. 06:59, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

• Plenty of reliable sources (Academic and otherwise) state that it is the flag, and nothing has been presented to invalidate them. Even a common-sense interpretation of photos of the location show that it is the flag. Any argument that is based upon 'it has to be a state' etc is frankly non-sensical. Mount Athos has a flag. Get over it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:22, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Yet another person too lazy to read. Next? Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:30, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
    • I did waste my time reading that talkpage. Your arguments are laughably bad and easily refuted as has been done by others above. Please provide an argument backed up by reliable sources to counter those provided to support the inclusion of the flag. Even those few of the sources provided which are less than the highest quality, are supported by better ones. Picking off the low-hanging fruit does not turn the tree barren. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:43, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

As for the sources provided by Dr.K., yes, some sources may be strong, other sources may be weak. True. But to argue on weak and strong sources and ignore the reality, is to argue about the tree and ignore the forest. This dispute for me has come to a natural end and I strongly believe the flag should stay on the infobox unless Future Perfect provides to us strong sources backing his POV about the flag of the self-governed Athonite polity.

And last, I have reminded Future Perfect in the talkpage that Wikipedia simply cannot rely on his POV, but on sources and facts. --SILENTRESIDENT 10:24, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

• I think no-one here disputes that the flag is used in Athos, but FutPerf makes a good argument: why is this the flag of Athos specifically? In other words, is this a state flag because Athos is an autonomous polity, or is it simply in use there because Athos is part of the Orthodox Church? The sources, frankly, don't inspire too much confidence. Normally, I'd say they fulfill the WP:RS criteria, but my own experiences with Greek flag matters have taught me to be very careful: vexillological matters are notoriously ill documented and researched in Greece, and most foreign sources are (unsurprisingly) usually misinformed to some degree, or display a peculiar kind of bias in trying to fill patterns familiar to them but absent in Greece (of course a vexillologist will find "state flags" everywhere, he is conditioned to do so). For instance, "During the millennial celebration of Mount Athos, it was often possible to see this flag flying together with the national flag of Greece" is a non-argument. One can see the same flags in front of literally every church in Greece, and only complete ignorance of that can excuse its inclusion here, ignorance which does not speak well as to the accuracy of the source on this issue. It is almost as if the author has seen pictures, or read reports, of the celebrations, but never been anywhere else in Greece himself. I am all the more uncertain because the origin of this particular flag is obscure: I still have not seen a reliable source that details when and how it began to be used, and when it was adopted (if it ever was done so officially) as the flag of the GOC (or was it possibly used by Athos before that? who knows?). Furthermore, this flag is commonly known in Greece as the "Byzantine" flag, which is complete nonsense (but yet another indication of the complete lack of awareness on vexillological matters in Greece). Personally, I think that the flag is used in at least semi-official capacity (especially because the monks probably consider it to have been truly the flag of the Byzantine Empire), but would prefer a simple description on the lines of "Flag of the GOC, commonly used throughout Athos", rather than attribute to it a status that is uncertain. Constantine ✍ 12:12, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

When you say "During the millennial celebration of Mount Athos, it was often possible to see this flag flying together with the national flag of Greece", I hope you are not attributing this argument to me? I hope this is not a misunderstanding of my "The Holy Mountain existed as a religious community for nearly 2 millenias", with which I am pointing out to the fact that the Athonite institutions are older than most of Europe, older even than the Vatican institutions, and that not all historical institutions have a constitution in the modern sense of the word, one that defines explicitly the athonite flag in the same sense the constitution of Greece does for the Greek flag. The caption is no problem for me, so I am fine with your proposed "Flag of the GOC, commonly used throughout Athos" caption. I shall note that such a caption is already used in the article of the Greek Orthodox Church, so I can't see what problem can there be if we use the same for Mount Athos. But, Constantine, I wish you good luck in convincing the user Future Perfect, into accepting your proposal. At least from my part do not expect to say anything more. --SILENTRESIDENT 13:07, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

No SilentResident, my quote is taken directly from Source #2, the The Flag Bulletin article, which appears to use this as corroborating evidence. I chose this to highlight the problematic nature of the sources: this particular source appears to be the most qualitative one as it comes from a journal of the field and is not a generalist work, so one would expect the author to have researched his claims rather than copy from other sources, yet even here there are question marks as to what the author(s) actually know, guess, or repeat from other sources. Constantine ✍ 13:27, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

• • A solution with a caption like the one proposed by Cplakidas (preferably outside the infobox, perhaps again near the "Administraton" section) would be fine with me. Indeed, nobody denies that the flag is commonly used by the Athonites. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:48, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

No way, Future Perfect. To have the flag moved from the infobox is basically to have what you wanted in the first place: remove the flag completely from the infobox to suit your POV. I vehemently am opposing this and I suggest you accept Cplakida's proposal which is to keep the flag but with a different caption, is a good compromise which takes in account both your concerns and everyone else's. --SILENTRESIDENT 14:09, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict × 2) He said (preferably outside the infobox,... I think that it is ok to keep it in the infobox with a suitable caption, even referring to the two strongest RS [2] and [4] which support it as the flag of Athos. Dr. K. 14:24, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

I wouldn't be so certain #2 and #4 are better than the rest. I was simply not yet done reviewing them. One red flag is that the intro text about Mount Athos in the "Flag Bulletin" source on p.103 (as far as I could google it) is almost verbatim copied (plagiarized) from Encyclopedia Britannica, with only quite superficial changes of wording. And #4 doesn't support anything at all, because (at least the way you quote it) it is ungrammatical gibberish. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:35, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

You can be as pedantic as you wish, but the snipet of source [4] by expert William Crampton, founder of the Flag Institute, mentions Mount Athos (Church or not) and it can easily be deciphered as meaning that it is the flag of Athos and the Greek Orthodox Church. In any case, this is resolved by someone obtaining a copy of the RS. Ref [2] is reliable, and even after Kostas Plakidas's extreme vetting the source remains RS. It is not up to you to determine the validity of these sources alone; that's why we are at RSN. Dr. K. 14:47, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

About #2: A source that lifts its entire first paragraphs from Britannica is quite obviously not a reliable source about anything. I'm astonished at your defending such a practice. About #4, you seem to be over-impressed by the credentials of Mr Crampton. William Crampton was a schoolteacher of sorts with a degree in sociology and an amateur self-styled "researcher" on flags. He founded a club for his hobby-horse, which he called an "Institute". That doesn't make him, or the publications spawned by his institute, an academic authority. (Nor does the fact that we have a walled garden of promotional articles about that Flag Institute and related figures, all sourced almost exclusively to their own self-published press releases and written by a handful of COI users on Wikipedia some time ago.) He certainly wasn't an academic expert on the constitutional order of Mount Athos. His Complete Guide is a 136-page booklet published by a general-interest, non-academic publisher, with no signs of any criteria of academic rigour. In that book we find (at most) a parenthetical half-sentence mentioning Mount Athos in passing, with no further documentation. That's certainly not enough for us to do anything with. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:58, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

About #2: A source that lifts its entire first paragraphs from Britannica is quite obviously not a reliable source about anything. I'm astonished at your defending such a practice. EB is a reliable source and copying EB verbatim is allowed as long as it is from the 1911 edition which is in the public domain. This practice is allowed on Wikipedia, and I am astonished you didn't know about it, although I suspect that you do but you could not resist another cheap stunt, coming after the most recent one with (both Wikipedia editors and authors out there are proliferating a POV falsehood: that Mount Athos is a "state" (and as such, can be expected to have a state flag), a fact that was rebutted and proven to be useless and a clear useless falsification intended to smear the reputations of reputable editors here. The fact remains that The Flag Bulletin is a recognised specialist publication and a reliable source. About #4, you seem to be over-impressed by the credentials of Mr Crampton. William Crampton was a schoolteacher of sorts with a degree in sociology and an amateur self-styled "researcher" on flags. Your self-serving analysis of Crampton's origins goes against his long career and practice as a flag expert and his international standing as an expert. Crampton, your original research notwithstanding, is an internationally-recognised expert on flags and as such his source is a reliable source. He founded a club for his hobby-horse, which he called an "Institute". That doesn't make him, or the publications spawned by his institute, an academic authority. More manufactured original research intended to belittle Compton and the Flag Institute. Just read the article on what you call so dismissively "hobby horse" to see what an important institute it is and go to their website to check the specialist and expert flag-related work they do in the UK and internationally. That doesn't make him, or the publications spawned by his institute, an academic authority. More pretentious academic "rigour" claptrap. You don't need to have a Ph.D. in flag-ology to determine if Mount Athos has a flag or not. That monastic state has a flag which is a fact recognised by many reliable sources specialising in flags. Mount Athos, being a primarily religious entity, is averse to creating elements associated with official statehood such as constitution, rigorous flag adoptions and descriptions etc. But its long practice of using this flag has been documented and verified by flag experts. You don't get to belittle the long practice of these flag experts, and international respect and recognition they enjoy for their work classifying and categorising flags, because of your manufactured haughty requirements of "academic rigour" for such an obvious fact, namely that Athos has a flag which by tradition and wide recognition, has become the official flag of that monastic entity. Your pretentious "academic rigour" requirements aside, this is a self-evident and RS-recognised fact. Dr. K. 16:42, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Mount Athos, being a primarily religious entity, is averse to creating elements associated with official statehood such as constitution, rigorous flag adoptions and descriptions etc. No pun intented, but I am wondering if Future Perfect, who declared himself an "Mount Athos expert", has ever been in Athos at all. The fact that he goes as far as to diminish all the reliable sources and even to demote the flag experts out there (who know more on flags than anyone here), only proves that we are dealing with a blatant POV case. The reason his POV has not found me agreeing with, is because the reality is quite different than his views. It is absolutely true that the Athonite institutions simply do not care about the outside world, nor they are going to write any constitutions just to formalize their flag and such. They are just running their monastic affairs and their monks are living their ascetic life. Nothing more, nothing less. And I am not expecting this reality to change anytime in the near future. Turning the flag and/or other Athonite descriptions or symbols into a big never-ending debate (I shall remind you it has been years since Future Perfect is stirring up this disruption about the flag), is not productive and I prefer that we spend our valuable time on other Wiki articles that could need our attention more than Mount Athos. --SILENTRESIDENT 17:15, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Who said the plagiarism was from the public domain EB1911? It was from more recent versions (EB1911 had very different language, while the language in the current web edition of EB is still substantially identical to that copied in the Flag Bulletin article.) And even if it had been from an old public-domain edition: we are here talking not about what is "allowed on Wikipedia", but what is proper academic practice in scholarly journals. Lifting text from a public domain source may be not illegal in terms of copyright, but it still constitutes academic plagiarism if done without acknowledgment. Lifting text from a copyrighted source, as was done here, is of course even worse. And therefore any "journal" article that does this is automatically disqualified as a reliable source. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:40, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Lifting text from a public domain source may be not illegal in terms of copyright, but it still constitutes academic plagiarism if done without acknowledgment. Lifting text from a copyrighted source, as was done here, is of course even worse. I have an EB edition from 1985 which incorporates large-scale text from EB 1911. I suspect this text may have been copied from EB 1911 to a newer edition of EB. If the editors failed to acknowledge this copy, it may have been a breach of academic plagiarism standards, but it does not automatically render the rest of their flag-related observations invalid. In any case, can you quote the actual text you are referring to? Dr. K. 20:03, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

I checked EB11, the text is not from there. And sorry, quoting the stuff is rather cumbersome, as I have to piece it together from Google snippets. I had started copying the stuff out bit by bit, but it got lost when I had to restart my computer. But I can assure you the first passages of the Flag Bulletin article are virtually identical to the passages in the present EB article [19], at least roughly from "semiautonomous republic of Greek Orthodox monks…" to "… only town of the subdivision is Kariaí (Karyaes)", again from "hermits inhabited Athos before ad 850 […]" to "… who granted Athos its first charter (Typikon)", and again from "The community’s present constitution dates from 1924…". There are bits in between that I couldn't access through Google snippets and I didn't work my way through all the rest of the article, so I can't say where it starts being more original. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:15, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for checking with EB11. No problem with the snippet-stitching. I know how cumbersome it can be. Dr. K. 20:59, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Above: More manufactured original research intended to belittle Compton and the Flag Institute. Just read the article on what you call so dismissively "hobby horse" to see what an important institute it is and go to their website to check the specialist and expert flag-related work they do in the UK and internationally. That intrigued me, so I clicked on the link. It's an organization that concerns itself with Vexillology. The latter article says that vexillology is defined by an organization (the most prominent?) as the creation and development of a body of knowledge about flags of all types, their forms and functions, and of scientific theories and principles based on that knowledge. Well, I wondered, what is the body of knowledge, what are the theories, what are the principles? The article says nothing. From what's written about it in en:WP, I infer that vexillology has academic aspirations but not that it's academic. (Of course, I'm willing to believe that the vexillology article is seriously defective.) -- Hoary (talk) 09:27, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

Your points are well made and I agree with your conclusions. I also appreciate, as always, your understated sense of humour. As I said above, I don't think you have to have a Ph.D. to do research on the practice and tradition of flags. I also don't think that these institutes have to be academic to determine the characteristics and traditional use of flags and other symbols. I also don't expect anyone to write a Ph.D. thesis, or research paper, on the subject of the existence of the Athos flag. But I don't think that the combined practical knowledge, research, and expertise of these authors, institutes, and publications can be dismissed. The point is that longterm traditional use of this flag by Athos can be examined, and, since Athos is a separate entity from the Greek Orthodox church, the flag can be considered Athos's own. If you expect any signatures, constitutions, bureaucracy, and written papers from the monks, who have specifically made a vow to only serve the divine and avoid worldly matters, then you will not get the definitive answer you expected. The matter comes down to a choice between dismissing tradition and documented historical usage of the flag by Athos, as part of its deliberately faint worldly identity, or to respect the tradition, and longterm use, that defines its flag, as documented by the sources under examination. Dr. K. 11:17, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

--❤ SILENTRESIDENT ❤ 13:14, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

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.