Talk:Flag semaphore

message: Notice: this discussion's history is available in Talk:Semaphore line
:I'm coming here in the middle, but another one of these crept in (using a novel as its cite); I've moved it into the "trivia" section and templated that section as such. I'm guessing this article just needs cleanup of the "legacy" or "in culture" section or whatever this discussion is all about. -- B.S. Lawrence (talk) 15:40, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I found the Japanese semaphore section fascinating and educational. Until there is enough content to be split off into an entire article on Japanese semaphore this seems the most logical place to keep it. It's likely that other cultures have different flag signal systems, and those should probably be covered too - but I'm not the person to ask about those traditions. Wyvern (talk) 00:50, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: References in fiction 

message: The pokémon Xatu in the pokémon universe is known for using semaphore during the series.
172.147.203.192 19:54, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fiction:Pokémon 

message: Although someone has clearly done a lot of painstaking work on this, which I appreciate, I believe that the whole Japanese section is inappropriate for en.wipedia and should be erased. What do others think?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cooke (talk • contribs) 21:30, 9 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I found the Japanese semaphore section fascinating and educational. Until there is enough content to be split off into an entire article on Japanese semaphore this seems the most logical place to keep it. It's likely that other cultures have different flag signal systems, and those should probably be covered too - but I'm not the person to ask about those traditions. Wyvern (talk) 00:50, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Japanese

message: :Notice: this discussion's history is available in Talk:Semaphore line
I gave this article a total rewrite as per flag --DV8 2XL 04:06, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: great work man ! :) --Procrastinating@talk2me 08:46, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. --DV8 2XL 10:00, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Total rewrite 

message: :Notice: this discussion's history is available in Talk:Semaphore line
Hello,
I'm just doing a cleanup of the external links for this article. Below are the entries I removed:
*Semaphore online translator (online animated semaphore translator)
*Semaphore Flag Signalling System (shows stick figure waving flags)
*International Maritime Signal Flags (sometimes confused with semaphore flags; shows alphabetic/numeric maritime flags)
*International Maritime Signal Flags (shows the meaning of each flag, and two-letter meanings)
*U. S. Navy Flags (shows the meaning of each flag)
*Maritime Signal Flags (a brief illustrated history of maritime flags)
*World War I and II Royal Navy Flags (historical; shows the meaning of each flag)
*U. S. Storm Signal Flags (pictures and description)
*Automobile Racing Flags (picture and meaning of each flag)
*Skin Diving Flags (pictures and laws of use)
Most of these have nothing to do with semaphore, and instead are talking about marine signalling flags. Two of them are dead links, and one of them is merely a set of images identical in function to those in the article.
The two pages Semaphore (comunication) and Semaphore (communication) are both based on the same article but have been copyedited into two different ways. They should be merged. -- JeLuF 10:17 Dec 31, 2002 (UTC)
I'm not sure we need disambiguation for this anyway -- see Talk:Semaphore -- Tarquin 10:28 Dec 31, 2002 (UTC)
I have also remove - A Manual of Signals: For The Use Of Signal Officers In The Field for being some thing about the army, not semaphore...209.247.21.165 14:25, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There's plenty here to warrant this article's existance. And there are a ton of different kinds of optical communication, all that page does is act as an overview.LRT24 (talk) 09:09, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  External Link Cleanup 

message: :Notice: this discussion's history is available in Talk:Semaphore line
90.241.22.219, in their January 9th, removed the signals for X, Y and Z claiming they were "copyrighted". I don't think flag positions can be. Shouldn't that edit be undone? — Jacobo 14:28, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. I put them back. --David Edgar 14:46, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyrighted signals? 

message: We have:
*International maritime signal flags
*International Code of Signals
*Maritime flag signalling
*Flag signals
*Flaghoist signalling
*Flag semaphore
*Substitute flag
*International maritime signal flags
*Naval flag signalling
Surely some of these can be combined with benefit to readability and context. --Wtshymanski (talk) 20:48, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Many of the above listed articles really are overlapping and refer to the same system of international maritime signal flags. They could be combined. But flag semaphore, the topic of this article, is an entirely different system. In international maritime signal flags, there is a distinct flag for each letter and each numeral. They have different colors and figures to distinguish one flag from another. But in flag semaphore, there is only one kind of flags. It is the position of arms of the sender that marks different letters, not the flags itself. -KLS (talk) 14:12, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Overlapping articles?

message: The intro mentions flag semaphore being used at Trafalgar. My understanding was always that flaghoist signalling was the method used by the Royal Navy back then, and Nelsons famous signal was definately done by flaghoist. Certainly the French had lines of mechanical semaphore towers, but I've never heard anything about flag semaphore that early. The sources I can find also seem to indicate that flag semaphore wasn't very useful aboard ship, and that flaghoist was still usually preferred. LRT24 (talk) 09:40, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I have removed the unsourced info. LRT24 (talk) 04:36, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Flag semaphore vs. flaghoist

message: Just wonder if each and every ordinary language has its own flag-semaphore counterpart? Is there some kind of international, or universal, flag semaphore? --Roland 07:17, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Flag Semaphore vs. the Ordinary Language

message: Looks to me like that sailor has his semphore flags in the wrong hands.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.186.29.129 (talk) 17:56, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Wrong hands in photo?

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Flag semaphore. Please take a moment to review my edit. You may add  after the link to keep me from modifying it, if I keep adding bad data, but formatting bugs should be reported instead. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether, but should be used as a last resort. I made the following changes:
*Attempted to fix sourcing for http://www.scoutnet.or.jp/~innami/tebata.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 20:37, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: It cannot be a coincidence that many of the flag semaphore codepoints when turned through 90° are identical to the Foy-Breguet telegraph code. Does anyone know how they came to be connected? SpinningSpark 23:17, 4 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Foy-Breguet 

message: The semaphore flags shown in the leading US Navy photograph are correctly oriented. The stick handles are along the yellow fields of the flags, and the diagonal between the red and yellow sections starts at the top of the stick handles and extends to the lower opposite corner on the fly. And the text is correct in that the semaphore flag for at-sea signaling is the "Oscar" flag. The Oscar Flag shows a yellow field to the lower left corner, the red field to the upper right corner, and the hoist is along the yellow side at the left.
However, in the Characters Section, the flags shown in each of the graphic icons are wrong. The flags are shown attached to the stick handles along the red field, and the diagonal runs from lower on the stick handles to the upper opposite corner on the fly. This is NOT the proper orientation of the Oscar flag. Each flag in each of the graphic icons is incorrectly turned 90°. This is both an external and internal error in the article in that the basic orientation of the flags is wrong (external), and it contradicts with the lead photo and the text description (internal). 
I don't have the authority to change the flag icons, so I hope this message gets through to the creators of the icons and that they make the appropriate corrections.
I should note that on searching the internet, there are many, many sources that show the incorrect orientation of the flags. You can even purchase semaphore flags from on-line sources, that are incorrectly made.
Eric W. Sponberg
Eric W Sponberg (talk) 05:30, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semaphore Flag icons are in error 

message: Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the article says how one signals a repeated letter/digit.  Maybe this should be added to the Characters section, which is where the other stuff pertaining to the protocol of transmission is? Sambda (talk) 04:53, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Protocol for signalling repeated characters 

message: The animation of the person spelling out a word in semaphore is a nice demonstration, but it's quite distracting if you're trying to focus on the contents of the page (say, if you're trying to use the table to decode something in the semaphore cipher). Is there a way to make it so the animation can be paused? Gaga654 (talk) 02:30, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pause animated GIF?