Flag similarity: Hungary/Bulgaria

[pinnerup]

I commonly mistake the flag of Hungary for Bulgaria and vice versa.
Both are plain undecorated horizontal tricolors with these colours (rotated one place): red, white, green (although the shade of green is slightly different).
Maybe a flag similarity note could be added to disambiguate between the two?

[aplaice]

Thanks for raising the issue!

Unfortunately, this doesn't fall within our guidelines for flag similarities which aim to categorise what are (we believe!) the most frequent sources of confusion. (We don't want too many flag similarities, in cases that aren't usually confused, since there's a risk of them all just being ignored (apart from the most frequent cases that we currently cover, there are some others that are mistaken/confused, but they're usually not the same for different people).)

You could add the flag similarity in your own deck, though it would be overwritten if you update the deck. :/

(I do think that it might be nice to have a set of "personal" fields (one for each of "country", "capital", "flag" and "map"?), that wouldn't be ever overwritten on deck update, but we don't have such, yet.)

[pinnerup]

I may misunderstand how the guidelines are to be interpreted, but looking at the flags side by side (Hungary, Bulgaria) and looking at the criteria listed, it would seem to me that the differences can be described by this combination:

Major differences (M)

• same colours in different positions (e.g. two swapped, three cyclically permuted ("rotated"))

Minor differences (m)

• slightly different colours (e.g. shade of blue, red vs. maroon, darker green)
• slightly different geometry (e.g. width, number of serrated edges for Qatar/Bahrain, size of canton)

That is, one major difference and two minor ones (0C 1M 2m 0n), which would seem to fall within the acceptable combinations listed below the list. But perhaps a minor difference item ("slightly different colours") isn't allowed to modify a major difference item?

Anyway, I agree it would be really neat with optional "personal" fields that wouldn't be overwritten in case of an update. I habitually add pronunciations to the "Country info" and "Capital info" fields locally.

[aplaice]

Oops, sorry, it seems you're right! (I'm not quite sure what I had been thinking...)

(Aside: the colours of the Hungarian flag have been updated on Wikipedia, to the official colours, but irrespective of which we use this doesn't change the conclusions.)

The colours of the two flags are indeed a cyclic permutation (rwg->wgr) (major difference). The geometries of the flags are different (2:1 vs. 5:3) (minor difference). Both of the colour differences (red vs. red and green vs. green) have a ΔE < 30 (G24 or G25, R24 or R21, depending on choice of Hungarian flag) (negligible difference). Overall 0C 1M 1m 1n, so yes, AFAICT we should have a flag similarity.

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I think that I'll also need to check Russia vs. the Netherlands/Luxembourg, and update https://github.com/anki-geo/ultimate-geography/wiki/Flag-similarities

@axelboc am I missing anything?

[axelboc]

I find the white top band above two coloured bands to be quite a distinctive feature, so I've personally never had trouble distinguishing the Russian and Bulgarian flags from others. The shade of green of the Hungarian flag also feels quite distinctive to me, so I'm surprised it's got such a low delta E when compared to the green of the Bulgarian flag.

But anyways, to each their own leeches! 😄 It all seems legit according to our current guidelines (including for Russia vs Netherlands/Luxembourg). If it helps @pinnerup and maybe others, it's fine by me!