While the flag icons that many editors use in various contexts in Wikipedia article can be useful in some circumstances, there are also problems associated with their overuse. The following are [suggested] guidelines for the use of flag icons.

Note: The term "country" as used below should be understood to also apply to other uses of flags, such as U.S. states, the United Nations, etc. Furthermore, the bulk of these recommendations are also applicable to official seals, coats of arms, and other representations which serve similar purposes to flag images.

• Flag icons should not be used in general prose in an article, including in the introduction paragraph's specification of birth and death places.
• Flag icons may be appropriate in infoboxes such as to indicate nationality (but again not for birth and death), and in tables/lists of country- or region-related information, such as comparison of global economic data or reporting of international sporting event results.
• The only reason to use flag icons without country names is when the flag has already appeared in the same article (or section, in the case of larger articles) with its country name.
• Larger flag images should not be used as stand-ins for images of people or other article topics, must have alt text and/or captions, and must explain their applicability in the caption if usage of the flag is limited.

Appropriate use

When flag icons may be helpful: Without denying the points made below, there are situations when flags can be useful:

• They can aid navigation in long lists/tables of countries (but do not do so universally, due to the strong similarity of some flags to others), such as for reporting political, economic, sporting or other statistical data: Many readers can more quickly scan a table with many countries if it has flag icons, which may "stand out" to the eye more immediately than the country name alone, especially if looking for a specific country.
• They can make it faster and easier to identify the "Nationality" (not birth/death) line in biographical infoboxes.
• They may be useful space-savers when used without the country name, if and only if they have been used previously in the article with both the flag and the country name, and when not used in main article text.
• Are useful in articles about international sporting events to show the representative nationality of players, which may differ from their actual, legal nationalities, especially in football (soccer).

Flag icons are intended for use in lists, tables and infoboxes, and should not be used in general article text, as in "...and after her third novel was published, Jackson moved to Bristol,  England, in April 2004, then..." An actual example from an article is available here, which shows clearly how distracting and unprofessional-looking this abuse of flag icons can be.

Flags place a great deal of emphasis on location, and in main article text this would be quite inappropriate. With a flag, Paul McCartney is emphatically English. Without a flag, he is a rock singer and songwriter who was in The Beatles, and who also happens to be English; the music points are surely more important than his "Englishness".

It may be tempting to use flag icons in the birth/death information in a biographical article's introduction, but this is strongly deprecated, as it implies nationality and will often confuse readers into incorrect assumptions of nationality (many people are born abroad due to travelling or militarily stationed parents, and never become citizens of the countries in which they were born, or do not acknowledge such citizenship in cases where it is automatically granted by incidence of birth location).

Misuse of flag icons most commonly takes the form of application of them where they are not actually helpful. Adding a country's flag next to its name does not actually provide any additional encyclopedically useful information in most contexts, and is often simply distracting. Wikipedia generally strongly eschews the use of images for decorative purposes, prefering those that provide additional essential information or needed illustration, for the benefit of readers.

Another common misuse of flags, in larger form, is in infoboxes for which an actually illustrative image of the subject is not yet available. This practice is strongly deprecated, especially in the case of biographical infoboxes, in which cases the use of the flag as an image of the person is both incorrect and nonsensical. While it may well be appropriate to use flags or official seals as principal images in infoboxes for places, government agencies (e.g. the FBI) and the like, in most cases even these uses have been replaced by more elaborate infoboxes that have specific fields for flag and seal images (as illustrated at Botswana and Santa Fe, New Mexico).

A third frequent abuse of these templates is simple over-use. Flag icons start to look silly when used to excess, as at an older version of Gianluca Zambrotta's infobox, in which they are more bewildering than helpful. A single flag icon in that infobox would be appropriate; six, many of them redundant, is not.

Wikipedia must not misuse flags simply because an actually appropriate flag does not seem to be available. For example, do not abuse the United Nations flag () to represent the entire world, as this is not an accurate application of the official flag of that international organization. See also the "#Inventing new flags and using non-flag stand-ins" section below.

Readability, usability and accessibility

Flag icons when used at all should be always appear (and be directly juxtaposed) with their country names at the first occurrence of the flag in an article (or in a section, when the article is long), such as in a list or table. This means that the usually sigular usage of such templates in infoboxes should always include the country name. The country name is generally much better known by readers, meanwhile only a few flags are near-universally recognized:

• — Most readers know what country this refers to.
• — But few will immediately if at all recognize the flag of Lesotho.

This fault of "flag-only" template misuse is especially common in infoboxes and in tables of sports, economic, political and sociological statistics. Use of flag templates without country names isn't simply a general usability issue, but an accessibility one as well, as it may render information difficult for color-blind readers to understand at all. And even for users with full vision, not all flags are easily distinguishable, especially when reduced to icon size:

•  Australia and  New Zealand.
•  USA and  Malaysia
•  China and  Soviet Union

For flag icon needs, the standardized flag templates produced by WikiProject Flag Template should almost invariably be used, and be used as intended. It is particularly ill-advised to subvert their intent by using the flag-only template, {{flagicon}}, to separate the flag from its country name so that something can be inserted between them. This greatly reduces readability and understandability, and presents unnecessary accessibility problems for those who depend on screen-reading browsers for the visually impaired, which will read the country name for them twice. Two examples that illustrate this faulty separation: athletes' names inserted between flag and country name, and worse yet, both movie release years and titles inserted.

When a flag icon template is needed more than once, the flag-and-name template, {{flag|Japan}} ( Japan) (for example) or its shorter variant {{flag|JPN}} ( JPN) should be used first, and may be reduced to {{flagicon|JPN}} () in subsequent uses. It is not mandatory to use the flag-only version later; many editors feel that tables, e.g. of sports stats, are easier to read if {{flag}} is used consistently and not replaced with {{flagicon}} at later occurrences. This guideline does not recommend either practice over the other, the choice of which should be discussed on an invididual article's talk page on aesthetic and usablity grounds for that particular case.

Failure to provide alt text (what appears in pop-up notes in many browsers when one hovers over the image with the mouse cursor) will also make the information meaningless or confusing for readers who rely on text-to-speech software, which reads this alt text aloud. However, this is mostly a problem of manual flag image usage, as it has been addressed in the standardized flag icon templates, all of which automatically provide the needed alt text.

Historical considerations

Flags change, and sometimes the geographic regions to which a flag applies also change.

It is recommended to use current flag icons (where appropriate to use such images at all) to represent individuals and general country-related topics. For example, a person born in Canada prior to 1965 should not be represented with the old Canadian Red Ensign () but the current flag of Canada (), despite the fact that the latter was not in use until 1965. The obsolete flag will be completely meaningless to the average reader, and nothing about the person in the article is generally being associated with that particular flag; rather, the flag icon is being used to visually indicate to the reader what country is applicable, and this is best done with the current flag. By contrast, an article about the Canadian government in the 1950s might well want to make use of the Red Ensign image somewhere in the article (not likely as an icon, but rather a standard image thumbnail, with an explanatory caption.) Similarly, in a hypothetical List of statesmen with wooden teeth that used flag icons, George Washington should appear with the present flag of the US (), not that of his Presidency (), and the fact that they look the same to the naked eye in icon form is irrelevant, since they are and are intended to be clickable to examine the full-size image.

When use of the flag and its associated country name has an officially or semi-officially applicable rationale, use the correct flag and country name for the time period. For example, in lists of Olympic medallists, the USSR flag and country name () should be used, not those of the Russian Federation () or the CIS (), for reporting stats predating 1992. When a flag has changed but the country (largely or entirely) has not, use the current flag (i.e. Canada should be represented in sports articles with its current flag, even for events predating the 1965 adoption of this flag) and despite that it has gained a small amount of territory from Britain since then, again because the flag's purpose in the article is to help the reader identify the country, not to make a historical point at the expense of the reader.

In a military history context, as a different example, it may well be appropriate to use the flags as they were used at the time, including naval ensigns, provided that the flags are, as usual, accompanied at first occurrence by their country names (our readers are not expected to be military historians.)

Some subnationational entities have not had flags until recently (e.g. the Welsh flag has only been official since 1959). While this flag can still represent Wales generally, it should not be used to represent the country when the context is specifically about a time period predating the flag.

Political issues

Beware political pitfalls, and listen to issues raised by other editors with concerns. Some flags are (sometimes or always) political statements and can associate a person with their political significance, sometimes misleadingly. In other cases, a flag may have limited and highly specific official uses, and an application outside that context can have political (e.g. nationalist or anti-nationalist) implications.

An illustrative case in point is the largely obsolete flag of Northern Ireland, the "Ulster Banner" (. Editors may incorrectly use it, and even imply false information about article subjects to readers for whom this flag has meanings not immediately apparent to editors unfamiliar with Northern Irish history and politics. The flag in question was used officially for a period by the local government and unofficially as a civil flag in that region, but is no longer used for either purpose (thus it does not appear in the infobox at the Northern Ireland article; the official flag of Northern Ireland today is that of the UK). Because the flag remains in popular, partisan use by Unionists as a rallying symbol, use of the flag icon in biographical infoboxes, or otherwise to represent the region or political entity in general, is directly misleading, as it implies to many readers not a place but rather a political position. Even more complicatedly, the flag remains in semi-official use in a sporting context, without political implications, and so is appropriate in tables of sports statistics in which Northern Ireland, along with Scotland, Wales and England, are represented separately rather than collectively as the UK. Even so, it should not be used in biographical infoboxes of sports figures to indicate nationality.

Similarly, the Republic of China, also known as Taiwan among other designations, is generally represented by its own civil and governmental flag () which is broadly internationally recognized. However, the mainland People's Republic of China claims this territory, with only limited recognition. Changing this flag in articles to that of the PRC () is impermissible PoV-pushing, and is likely to be perceived as disruptive. Nevertheless, the Taiwan flag can be misused. Many editors are unaware that Taiwan, in a compromise with the PRC, has agreed to use the name Chinese Taipei with a different flag () for all international sporting purposes (and only those purposes). Despite the fact that this flag was devised for the Olympics, it is also used for other sporting events. But not all of them! There are separate Chinese Taipei flags for both football (soccer) () and the Paralympic Games ().

Flags that are purely partisan or factional (such as many of those created by one political group or another in Northern Ireland) must never be used more generally or broadly in Wikipedia.

Biographical use

There have been many heated debates on talk pages about the "nationality" of people with complex life stories. Flags make simple, blunt statements about nationality, while words can express the facts with more complexity.

For example, the actress Naomi Watts could be said, depending upon context and point of view, to be any or all of: British, English, Welsh, or Australian. She was born a British citizen in England, lived in Wales for a long time, then moved to Australia and became an Australian citizen. There is no flag for that, and using all four flags will not be helpful.

This [draft] guideline recommends the following for biographical usage of flag templates (and recognizing the caveats given above):

• Using the flag and country name of current citizenship in the "Nationality" (again, not birth/death) line in the infobox
• Using the flags and names of both countries for infobox "Nationality" in the case of sourcedly-known dual citizenship (e.g. " United Kingdom /  Australia")
• Not using the flag and name of the former country in a case of sourcedly-known renuniciation of citizenship in that country
• Not using the flag and name of the former (or later) country where is is unknown whether legal citizenship applied (or applies); in particular, a recent immigrant from one country to another should not be automatically given the nationality of the second country
• If someone's nationality has legally changed because of shifting political borders, use the current country designation of their birthplace, not a former one
• Use the flag and name of the country that the person was officially representing, regardless of true nationality, when the flag templates are used for sports statistics (for example, Alex Pagulayan, a Filipino-Canadian who recently emigrated permanently to the Philippines, will sometimes be listed with the Canada flag templates and sometimes with those of the Philippines in tournament charts, depending upon the time period, but should have the Canadian flag in his infobox as he is not yet a Philippine citizen. Caution should be used in extending this convention to non-sporting contexts, as it may produce confusing results. A countervailing example would be an article about a sports team that officially represents a particular country but is composed of members who are citizens of several countries. A table of players at such an article might list them by their country of actual citizenship.

See also "Historical considerations" for other relevant recommendations.

Inventing new flags and using non-flag stand-ins

The practice of inventing a new flag to fill a perceived need for one is not simply deprecated but expressly forbidden by policy, as it constitutes original research; additionally it will most often advance a personal viewpoint which may have political or other contentious undertones, and it constitutes the neologistic invention of something that is unlikely to be recognizable or meaningful to anyone else (i.e. it is patent nonsense). One example of such an invention is a bogus "North American flag".

In some cases, "workarounds", have been instituted in the form of non-flag alternatives to flag images for use in flag icon templates, such as the use of "" for Ireland national rugby union team players (the team represents both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland). In other cases such as North America, a map icon might be applied (perhaps with dubious usefulness), e.g. "". For the entire world or for "international" in general, WikiProject Flag Template has provided {{flag|Earth}}, which can be customized, e.g. {{flag|Earth|name=worldwide}} (Template:Country data Earth). This [draft] guideline offers no opinion on the appropriateness or utility of these stand-ins, which require further community consensus-building as to their future and whether more of them should be created as needs are perceived.

• WikiProject Flag Template