The Vatican flag on Wikipedia was changed, now the wrong one has been used for years

What would happen if someone on Wikipedia changed the color of a small detail of a country's flag? Surely the error would be corrected and eliminated within minutes, right?

If someone changed Justin Bieber's date of birth, millions of fans would be running to their computers to correct the mistake. As life goes, that was not the case with the Vatican flag, and the problems that have ensued have persisted for years.

It all started in July 2017 when someone replaced the image of the Vatican flag that appears on Wikipedia with another one in which a small detail had been changed.

Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Vatican_City.svg

The inner crown, which was white, was changed to red in the new flag on Wikipedia because it is that color in the Vatican coat of arms.

The problem is that the crown on the flag's official datasheet is white, as one Reddit user noted in a thread that sparked a lot of discussion.

Despite the fact that an anonymous user noticed the detail and reported the error with a detailed explanation, the change was not corrected, giving the Vatican City flag a curious five years.

The troubles began when printers around the world appropriated the image from Wikipedia to print massive batches of Vatican flags.

Flags of Vatican City with the red tiara have been seen in many of the countries Pope Francis has visited since that summer of 2017.

It wasn't long before Vatican flags with the error printed on them were flying in June 2018 at the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva, Switzerland, in the presence of the Pope.

In the US, too, the false flag was seen on a building in Harrisburg during the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference held in March 2019.

That same year, but in November, during Pope Francis' visit to Bangkok, Thailand, thousands of people could be seen waving the red-crown flag.

And something similar happened in Baghdad when the Pope visited Iraq in March 2021.

Strangest of all, the Vatican has even used the fake flag itself when traveling, as with the Pope's visit to Peru in October 2018, where the Popemobile had the fake little flag on the front.

Also particularly strange is the fact that the United Nations headquarters in New York flew this flag, which was changed in September 2015, before Pope Francis' visit. Yes, we are talking about two years before the erroneous change on Wikipedia.

But Wikipedia's error about the flag isn't limited to the red tiara, as Nick Heer reports in an article for Pixel Envy. He points out that the yellow fill color is also lighter in the 2017 version than in the original.

William M. Becker, in his book on Vatican City flags, has confirmed that the red tiara flag has been in use since 1980. It's not the most correct option, but it's been accepted by the Vatican for more than 40 years, which is why the Holy See itself has used it at some of its events since then.