Template talk:German politics/party colours/Green

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[edit] The color green

Hi, that unifed green is a cruelty. Can it be changed (on all wikis, if that is necessary) to something more like the color I changed it to? -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 22:05, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Er, "cruelty"? We've been sticking to #99cc33 (rather than your proposal of #009900) for Green parties wikiwide for several reasons.

1. Green parties themselves tend to use either green + yellow colourschemes or #99cc33-type colouration. Look at B9/G's logo, for example. That's not a forest green at all—far more of a yellowish palour to it. Now, it's not as light as #99cc33, but that brings us on to...
2. Colour needs to illustrate parties distinctly rather than precisely match what sort of colour appears on their logo. By going with #99cc33 it leaves room for a contrasting party that also uses green at the darker end of the spectrum. And in most Western democracies (indeed, pretty much everyone that gets hefty Wikipedia treatment except Germany and NZ) there're other parties that are identified with the colour green, too—Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and Plaid Cymru in Britain and Ireland, the National Party of Australia, the Libertarian Party of Canada etc. These parties typically get darker greens in the local media, and since that most commonly frames notions of political colour in people's minds, Wikipedia follows their lead.
3. The Global Greens movement displays a greater degree of party interconnectedness and idea-sharing than other ideological traditions, and so keeping all the Green parties with the same colour from jurisdiction to jurisdiction has a nice feel to it. There's absolutely no ironclad reason to require consistency across the Wiki, but I think it's a nice touch that boosts readability.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I'm going to revert her back one more time, but that'll be it from me and I certainly don't want to start an edit war over something so trivial. I'd be interested to see if anyone else has any thoughts on this matter. I will caution that moving the Greens darker wikiwide could create general mayhem in terms of having to find new colour homes for a fair number of other parties. -The Tom 17:33, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

First of all: thanks for this explanation. Is there any place at Wikipedia where this debatte is going on for all colours? I see the need to distinguish between green parties and other parties using green colours. To the other two points the following ideas:

Global greens themselves (http://www.globalgreens.info/) are using two colors of green on their website; something that very much resembles the #99cc33 color and a very dark brown-green. The colors are changing if one goes one level below, i.e:

http://www.europeangreens.org/ looks more like my #009000 proposal. See also the following collage of logos (Eurocentric, I know) from the different European green parties.

Logos of green parties in Europe

http://www.fpva.org.mx/ is using quite different colors. At least the colors in the logo are blue/green, and not yellow/green

The other continental federation do not have websites

I guess if one is going to start looking at all the different national green parties, one will get everything from dark blue-green to light pastel green. It is true that there are efforts to bring together the global green parties -- I'm not sure if there are more efforts than, say, for the different social-democratic red or communist red parties. So I do not really see that a consistent color-scheme for green parties in all countries across wikipedia is more or less a necessarity than for other parties. Maybe there should be a central place to discuss this (but where?).

The second point is about the logo of the German Greens you are using as example. You are right for the image, but I think the colors used "in reality" are a bit different than in that jpg (which is converted from CMYK-space to RGB-space, leading to a genereal pastel look, if I guess correctly). See for example:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tillwe/28183940/ -- photograph of green party banner

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hensch/43133155/ -- campaign material (see logo)

http://gruene-service.de/schriften.648.0.html -- service portal, the last point is about the green background color to use in the election, defined as "C:80 M:0 Y:100 K:5"

So, for me (and of course also because of the media exposure and the green used in election statistics in Germany and so on), a "green green" has to have a quite pure green look -- maybe a bit more yellow-ish than blue-ish. -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 18:19, 9 October 2005 (UTC)