Talk:Flags at the White House

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Yoninah (talk) 15:33, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

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• Article history

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Artist's depiction of a Serbian flag flying over the White House in 1918

• ... that the Serbian flag was flown from the White House in 1918?
  • ALT1:... that a Serbian flag was flown from the White House roof in 1918?
  • ALT2:... that the only foreign flags to have ever flown over the White House are those of Serbia and France?

Created by Illegitimate Barrister (talk). Self-nominated at 17:37, 22 March 2020 (UTC).

@Illegitimate Barrister: The article is new enough for a DYK and passes everything. You only have 4 DYKS so you don't need a QPQ, but after this one you will need QPQ. Very interesting DYK since I thought that only the French flag had flown over the White House. - Jon698 (talk) 03:56, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

General eligibility:

• New enough:
• Long enough:
• Other problems:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
Freely licensed: Used in article: Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall:

Hi Jon698 & Illegitimate Barrister. I've altered the hooks to include bold links to the target article, please feel free to amend these. The article doesn't look to be long enough at present? I count 780 characters, whereas the requirement is for 1,500 characters. Possible avenues for expansion include discussion of the flying of the flag from half mast or discussion of Nixon's Proclamation 4000 which led to the flying of the flag 24/7 (apparently at the advice of his wife) and what the situation was before this? - Dumelow (talk) 10:29, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

• I've went ahead and added some more info. – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 18:19, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi Illegitimate Barrister. I count 1,192 characters of text in the current article. The minimum requirement in the DYK rules is for 1,500 characters - Dumelow (talk) 09:36, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

@Dumelow: The character count now exceeds 1,500. – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 14:09, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi Illegitimate Barrister, the length is now above the minimum. Rest of review carried out by Jon698 above - Dumelow (talk) 11:19, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

References

POW/MIA flag

Why no mention of the National League of Families POW/MIA flag? Andy Dingley (talk) 18:54, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Height of new flagpoles

There are multiple news sources with varying height reports - I've seen 100', 80', and 88'.

Considering the implication if they are 88' as USA Today claims, it would be worth it to confirm their actual height. 173.89.26.245 (talk) 14:23, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

Notably, the current cited source, the nypost article, says 100 feet not 88, so I'm not sure what's going on. Presumably the text in wikipedia should at least match the source text. If you poke around they appear to be the 80 foot flagpoles from usflag dot com. The origin of the number 88 appears to be Joey Garrison of USA Today, who may have heard the number 88 ("88 billion in tariffs") from Trump during the flagpole installation (you can check the video, Trump does say this, while consistently referring the to flagpoles are "close to 100 feet"). 71.227.220.254 (talk) 17:27, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

This point is clear the @gn22 is simply in love with the 88 foot story and will simply go find a new source that repeats the original error, no matter how tangentially, and put the number back. On the one hand this appears to be within Wikipedia policy as written but in the other it appears to be willful propagation of what is at this point an obvious error. 71.227.220.254 (talk) 00:45, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Any basic web research reveals many many sources that refer to "us flag and flagpole" of Plano Texas, owned by Ginger Kean, as the supplier, and that the flagpoles they supplied were their standard 80 foot product, which runs about $21,000 each, which is in line with the total project cost of about $100,000 ($42,000 for the flagpoles, installation, and flags) There is essentially no question here that these two flagpoles are the ones mentioned in the company catalog, and they are 80' tall.

You can of course locate individual references for pretty much any number you like, but at that point you're just constructing support for a falsehood. 71.227.220.254 (talk) 00:58, 20 September 2025 (UTC)