Talk:List of colors (compact)/Archive 1

Archive 1

Assessment

When I started creating this list I thought it will be useful. Now that I finished it, it doesn't seem as useful to me. Any feedback on whether to keep or delete this article? Jak123 (talk) 19:49, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I think this article is wonderful! Definitely keep! Keraunos (talk) 02:56, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I agree. This page is definitely very useful. Do NOT delete it! 15 November 2013 AlanBottomley (talk) 03:30, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Color mismatch

The color shown on this list for Lava does not match that shown on the article for that color.50.103.251.143 (talk) 00:10, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Why are there two vermilion colours?

And two Scarlet ones?! 00:17, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Two answer the scarlet one, one is a websafe variation.--BigMac1212 (talk) 02:58, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Missing Color/Colour

I can't find MU Gold. Is there a way to put that color in?--BigMac1212 (talk) 16:28, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

And I don't see a plain "azure", just variations of azure. Notice Wiktionary has an entry for azure and gives one colour.. what I wonder is: can there be any way to automatically have this list include colours named in other wikipedia articles or Wiktionary?? Just wondering. Maitchy (talk) 01:51, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Cosmic turquoise

Cosmic latte is included, why isn't cosmic turquoise? Lachlanricho444 (talk) 22:57, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Alphabetical order

Why is Licorice before Liberty? 22:48, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Not any more it's not.  — Myk Streja Talk to me 05:38, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

Why is Q not on it's own section, but merged into P? I'll fix that tomorrow or so. ~~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.41.1.56 (talk) 01:56, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Pantone Purple

According to this website http://www.pantone.com/color-finder/Purple-C, I have found some values for the Pantone's version of Purple: RGB: 187/41/187 HEX: BB29BB CYMK: 40 90 0 0 Hope that helps. --BigMac1212 (talk) 02:58, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Chinese Red

There are two entries for Chinese Red, one links to Shades of Pink: Chinese Red [1] which doesn't mention Chinese Red (anymore). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.80.37.199 (talk) 17:21, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Titian

Titian (hair) has its own wiki page. But is not here. MBG02 (talk) 03:34, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Another Missing Color

I Can't Find IU Crimson anywhere. Is there a way to put it in here?--BigMac1212 (talk) 10:42, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Delinking

Over the last couple of weeks a series of IP editors—which I strongly suspect are actually one person since the IPs are closely-related—have been systematically removing perfectly useful links. Despite being asked several times they have refused to use any kind of Edit Summary to justify their actions or give any rationale. The reason I noticed is because this article showed up on Weeklypedia as the most-edited article this last week! I am loath to simply rollback a bunch of edits which might include useful contributions but I would like to see some evidence of their actual usefulness. TIA HAND —Phil | Talk 17:17, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

RGB/Hex Mismatch on Minion Yellow

The color for Minion Yellow has an RGB value of RGB(245, 220, 80), but a Hex value of #F5E050. RGB(245, 220, 80) in Hex is #F5DC50. 24.39.231.50 (talk) 19:27, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Synchronization

This article purports to simply be a compact list of the A-F, G-M, and N-Z articles, yet it contains far more colors than those three articles combined (1542 vs 959). This seems to have resulted from the lack of effort to keep the articles synchronized since this article's creation in 2008. Of the discrepancies, 47 colors in the complete list are missing from this article and 630 colors in this article are missing from the complete list. I intend to resolve this by going through the discrepancies one at a time and checking their sources to see whether they need to be added or removed to re-synchronize the lists. Altay8 (talk) 21:35, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

@Altay8: Good luck to you, I think you have your work cut out for you. This list appears to have attracted a great deal of WP:OR activity where editors just add a color without feeling the need to provide anything resembling citations or support for the addition. Take, as just one example of many, the following two colors, noticeable because the second overruns the formatting for the page:

Pink Diamond (Ace Hardware Color)

Pink Diamond (Independent Retailers Colors)

Now, for the sake of argument I'm willing to take it on faith that a color named "Pink Diamond" appears somewhere in the Ace Hardware catalog, though I'm not able to find any evidence of that (and a citation would've been nice). But the second "pink diamond" entry invokes "independent retailers" in a similar fashion, as the name of a company or organization that defined the specific shade of pink. Problem is, there's no such company, because the phrase "independent retailer" is basically a jewelry-industry catchphrase representing the complete absence of any such organized, controlling body. (So if nothing else, it definitely shouldn't be capitalized like it's a company name, as no such company has ever existed.) Worst of all, both of those entries link to the same article: Pink. No specific section or anything. (Unsurprisingly, Pink does not contain the slightest shred of evidence in support of either color.

So, someone would have a really hard time convincing me the "Independent Retailers Colors" version has any genuine place on this list, or even genuinely exists, and wasn't just added by some editor who made it up and decided that getting their creation into Wikipedia made them somehow cool or important. The exact phrase "independent retailers colors" appears in exactly one place across all of Wikipedia. (Now, with this post, two places.) And while there are plenty of web hits for the "color" now, that's because Wikipedia is influential and every single one of those results is clearly sourced from the article.

But if you really do manage to bring any more order to this chaos, that'd be a welcome improvement! Best of luck. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 01:21, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

@Roxy the dog: The Silly Scents colors were removed from the List of colors: A–F, List of colors: G-M, and List of colors: N-Z pages. Alien Armpit was removed from this page in revision 894124000. Removing the Silly Scents in revision 919463832 was another step toward synchronization. If we really do want to keep them, they should be added back in all places. Altay8 (talk) 15:30, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

I just noticed that @Sphilbrick: put some effort into pruning the trio of non-compact List of colors pages last year and might care to chime in. Altay8 (talk) 15:30, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

Altay8, Thanks for noticing that I did some work on colors. I was energetic for a while then ran out of steam. Before I stopped, I did try to outline how I thought we ought to proceed in the future:

Talk:List_of_colors#Future_initiatives

Frankly, I was disappointed in the lack of response. While I may return to this sometime, some of my suggestions are far from trivial undertakings, and should be carried out only if there is a consensus of interested editors. I suppose I could create an RFC, and maybe I'll go that route if I return to more significant activity.

I did hint at how to handle articles such as the compact lists in the last section but that wasn't fully thought out at the time.

If it were my decision, I would treat the Lists of Colors xxx articles as primary and the others as derivative (using these terms in the ordinary English meaning not as words with specific Wikipedia meaning). That would mean that humans would work hard on making sure the Lists of Colors xxx articles are correct, and we would let a bot or a script or some automated process automatically update the derivative articles to keep them in sync. Doing so manually seems like a waste of good resources.

With all that said, I agree with what I took to be the implied assumption, namely,that the lists should be in sync. For example, we can debate whether the names of silly scents deserves to be in the lists or not in the lists, but I can't think of any rationale which would support inclusion in one list and exclusion from another. (I'll reiterate that I'm not an expert on color so if someone comes up with a good counterargument I'd be open to listening, and this also reiterates my desire not to go ahead and do something without input from others.) S Philbrick(Talk) 21:15, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Discussion at WT:WPCOL

I have started one regarding this article. -Roxy, the dog. wooF 20:52, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

University colors

An attempt to add Yale Blue to this page was recently reverted without an explanation. I can understand that we may not want to allow university colors on this page because of the vast number of universities, but there are already at least four university colors listed: Boston University red, Crimson (UA), KSU Purple, and KU Crimson. @Sphilbrick: made a comment last year supporting the inclusion of Alabama Crimson, so I'm leaning toward including university colors. Thoughts? Altay8 (talk) 15:13, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Altay8, We can formalize this if needed but I will speak casually for the moment.

If the University of XYZ pics either color in general use or unique color and decides to call at XYZ blue or XYZ red or something along that line, and the only place one can find a reference to that color is on the University's own website (or maybe something related like a blog talking about the University), then I would view that color as not justifying inclusion as a standalone color which is our informal criteria for inclusion in any of the lists of color.

In contrast, a color like Carolina blue tends to be used by quite a few schools and in other contexts, so references to the color appear in publish reliable sources other than the University of North Carolina.

While I don't recall what steps I took to verify Alabama Crimson, I feel confident that there are such sources. I realize there are a lot of universities, all of which potentially could choose their own color, but I'm not worried about this for two reasons:

1. The vast majority of universities choose colors that are already extant, or increasingly make reference to Pantone numbers, so this will not increase the number of colors of the form XYZ color.
2. A few universities may decide to give their university's name to the selected color and refer to it that way but if that does not get picked up in outside published sources, then it won't add to the list. S Philbrick(Talk) 21:01, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

My most recent change did away with Harvard crimson and Heidelberg red since neither of the linked pages actually included an infobox for those colors. For now, that seems like a reasonable metric to gauge a university color's notability. Since the article for Crimson considers Crimson (UA) notable enough as a color to have an infobox for it, it seems worthy of including in the list. I'm open to alternatives, but this is what I'm going with for now. Altay8 (talk) 16:22, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

HSL

Several of the colors on this page (e.g. Corn, Dandelion, Eggplant) specify an HSL lightness or saturation value even though those are not displayed anywhere. I'm assuming they were copied over here by mistake and we should remove HSL values from the table. Altay8 (talk) 21:05, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Crayola

Almost all of the colors on this page citing Crayola as a source reference the List of Crayola crayon colors page. That article has a couple footnotes indicating that the RGB color codes in the table are merely approximations and not authoritative. Indeed, many of the sources cited on that page are archives of pages that no longer exist and don't contain RGB color codes. The most authoritative source of Crayola colors appears to be this webpage which makes no claims that the color swatches present correspond to the official RGB values rather than merely representing approximations of the colors of their crayons. The purpose of List of Crayola crayon colors as a source of approximate values for historic Crayola crayons seems fine to me, but as a result I don't think it is an appropriate reference for colors on this page. Altay8 (talk) 21:48, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Having now read through the discussion on the List of Crayola crayon colors talk page, I'm increasingly convinced that Crayola colors do not belong on this list of colors page. I haven't been able to find any authoritative external sources that make the claim that any of the names of Crayola colors correspond to specific color codes in the RGB color space. Rather, what has happened is that the List of Crayola crayon colors page has made a valiant effort to provide color samples to approximate the colors of Crayola's crayons and markers, and then these color swatches have been interpreted as authoritative sources for a mapping between Crayola's color names and hex color codes. An excellent example of this is the color Baby Powder, which is listed on the List of colors pages as #FEFEFA and links to this section of Shades of white, which cites the List of Crayola crayon colors page, which lists it as #FFFFFF instead. No doubt what happened is that one person thought it looked closest to #FEFEFA, but then someone realized Crayola simply uses Baby Powder as another name for White and fixed the hex code to match White, but never updated the downstream pages. @Sphilbrick: What do you think about the idea of removing Crayola colors from the List of colors pages entirely? When we last discussed the validity of Silly Scents you argued that we provide a service to readers searching for e.g. "Sasquatch Socks" by providing them a color swatch, but it seems like the appropriate place for that is the List of Crayola crayon colors page, and not the List of colors pages. Altay8 (talk) 15:11, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Altay8, I want to give this some thought, but I have several things I'm trying to deal with at the moment. I will try to look tomorrow, but ping me if I don't get back to you. S Philbrick(Talk) 16:22, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

@Sphilbrick: Ping. Just to clarify my proposal, I expect removing Crayola colors from the list will be an unpopular decision and I don't consider it a priority (first I need to finish cleaning up I-Z). However, I think the hex codes that have been associated with the names from that source are rather arbitrary and have gotten a free pass due to the incorrect impression that they have been officially published by Crayola. On a related note, I'd appreciate your thoughts on the addition of a source column to the non-compact articles which would make it easier to disambiguate duplicate names and to spot unsourced or poorly sourced additions to the table. Altay8 (talk) 21:04, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Green-yellow is another good example to support my case against Crayola-sourced colors. This page has a non-Crayola version with code #ADFF2F which looks chartreuse and a Crayola version with code #F0E891 which looks beige. Weirdly, the List of Crayola crayon colors page lists Crayola's color for green-yellow as #F1E788, but that's not too far off from #F0E891. If we look at the source code of the page it cites, we find that the sample used for the swatch is indeed #F1E788. However, the Shades of green page has a photograph of the crayon and it's pretty clear to see that it's actually a chartreuse shade, not beige. Here's another photo that also includes the label and compares it to green and yellow-green. I know lighting is an issue with photos, but they don't appear to corroborate the sample on Crayola's website. Altay8 (talk) 21:36, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Altay8, Removing Crayola colors will be an extremely painful action. I can think of few popular items more associated with colors than Crayola crayons. That said, the sourcing of the hex code is quite troublesome, and seems to be a clear example of WP:OR That policy does have some provisions for use of statements that are not strictly included in the source: Routine calculations do not count as original research, provided there is consensus among editors that the result of the calculation is obvious, correct, and a meaningful reflection of the sources. Basic arithmetic, such as adding numbers, converting units, or calculating a person's age are some examples of routine calculations. But I think it is a bridge too far to conclude that extracting the hex code form a company website constiutes a routine calculation.

I note that the article List of Crayola crayon colors averages over 20,000 page views a month. While the article would not be useless without hex codes, removing them would significant degrade from the article, and it might be hard to justify inclusion of the color swatches without acceptable references.

I confess a bit of surprise that a company as established as Binney & Smith has not publicly documented this most basic of information, and perhaps if the article were edited to remove unsupported information, they might be motivated to help.

My hope is that someone would reach out to them. I hope you will consider it, but that's not a reasonable request. What I think may be a reasonable request is to store this information in a non-indexed subpage, on the chance that the information does become available, so that it could be easily restored. S Philbrick(Talk) 14:48, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

Altay8, It also occurs to me that, even if removed, it is recoverable from history, but let's make sure it is easy to restore if, for example, Binney and Smith decided to publish the information. S Philbrick(Talk) 16:31, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

Sphilbrick, I'd like to clarify that I'm not advocating removing the hex codes from List of Crayola crayon colors. I see its role as distinct from the other List of colors pages, since it serves to document the history of Crayola's crayons rather than make authoritative claims about the names of color codes. I'm satisfied with their wording of "Hexadecimal in their website depiction" which makes it clear to me that they are simply providing an approximation. I suppose List of fictional colors is also distinct, but it hasn't been bleeding into the other List of colors pages.

I sent Crayola a message via the contact form on their website asking whether the RGB values on their Explore Colors page should be interpreted as exact or approximate values. I'm not expecting a useful response, but I'll see what they say.

I'm much more concerned about establishing a reasonable bar for inclusion of a color in the four List of colors pages (i.e. A-F, G-M, N-Z, and compact) than I am about the state of the various other color-related pages on Wikipedia. The latter feels beyond my scope.

Once the pandemic is over I also intend to take a look at A Dictionary of Color by Maerz and Paul at my local library since I'm curious both how well the color swatches in that book match the color codes that cite it, and what other colors in that book are missing from the list. It seems like only an arbitrary handful have made the list (Amaranth, Carmine, and maybe some others?). This is part of my motivation behind wanting to add a source column to the non-compact List of colors pages, to make it easier to see how many of the colors come from which books. Altay8 (talk) 22:32, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Altay8, I understand (now), although my response didn't make that clear, because I wasn't making the distinction.

I know I've encountered issues in the past, where a color is in a list article, and also some other article. I have taken the position that an entry in a list does not need to be reliably sourced if it links to an article that is reliably sourced (As an aside, some editors take a harder stance.)

If the linked article was not properly sourced, I removed it from the List article, but I did not address the sourcing problem of the linked article. Not because it was OK, but when I started, and had hundreds of colors to review, I didn't want to create the tar baby of also cleaning up every linked article.

We could take the same approach here - argue that the source of the information isn't adequately sourced, so remove the entry from the list of colors articles, but leave the list of Crayola colors alone for the time being.

I am hopeful (but not expectant) that Crayola will respond, so it is worth waiting a bit.

It also occurs to me that I should start over, and start looking at some of the (formerly) linked articles with a more careful review of the sourcing. S Philbrick(Talk) 14:28, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I received the following response from a Consumer Care Professional at Crayola: "Thank you for your question! Our Explore Colors page on Crayola.com is only a sample of the colors of our products. We do not have corresponding hex codes available for any Crayola(R) colors." Altay8 (talk) 16:03, 22 April 2020 (UTC)