Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Color/Archive 9

Discussion 1

@Spinningspark, TartarTorte, Ljleppan, Jay, and ThunderBrine: A lot of "shades of green"-related redirects have been brought up for discussion recently and a broader pattern has become evident. There should probably be a broader discussion about what to do about this situation somewhere, so I've started one here.

Much of the current situation was created by ThunderBrine (talk · contribs) during early 2021. They also made extensive changes to many other colour-related articles (shades of red, orange, azure, cyan) over the course of the same year. I don't know if these changes were discussed anywhere, but they have resulted in many entries being placed in counter-intuitive places (like "olive" being listed as a shade of yellow rather than a shade of green) as well as the creation of some oddly specific "shades of" lists like Shades of chartreuse and the current list at Spring green. Additionally, these lists have been desynchronised with their respective templates. (eg. {{Shades of green}})

These issues were noted recently at several redirects for discussion. (See eg. Army green at August 12, Asparagus at August 11, Avocado at August 5.) – Scyrme (talk) 16:21, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

• I think they should be moved to where they are most intuitively as opposed to where they should be located based on a spectral analysis, but if the latter is/or becomes consensus that's fine. My main concern is that when colors are moved the corresponding redirects are also moved. I am not sure the best way to accomplish this because there's nothing informing you that pages redirect to a section when removing that section. TartarTorte 16:24, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

• My opinion is that we should go through ThunderBrine's colour-related edits from that period and revert them en masse (with sensible exceptions). The principle that colours should be grouped according to their wavelength or their angle on the colour wheel (which is what ThunderBrine has been doing) is fundamentally misguided. Colour is a subjective quality and perceived colour can and does change with changes of luminance and saturation. There is no objective way to classify colours; one can only ask how a colour is subjectively perceived. As I argued in the army green redirect, this perception changes dramatically with species. In humans a mixture of green and red light is perceived as yellow. For most tones of yellow, humans are not able to distinguish this colour from the equivalent monochromatic yellow. However, many species will perceive these as totally different colours. A fully objective classification (a la ThunderBrine) would have to call the mixed colour a different name, such as red-green (colour). The fact that we have no such redirect tells you why such a classification is not the way to go. SpinningSpark 18:13, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

• The colors should be moved back, the categories should be based on common associations with the color terms instead of arbitrarily deciding based on hue in a HSL/HSV coordinate system many of which do not fully cover green well, let along the full color space. I also continue to have reservations about the over reliance in general of "exact" appearing color coordinates in a large number of our articles about colors, especially the shades of articles. PaleAqua (talk) 20:14, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Some more prior discussions, not exhaustive:

• Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2010 May 17#Template:Shades of spring green
• Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2011 July 11#Template:Shades of spring green
• Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2011 July 12
• Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 March 26

PaleAqua (talk) 20:24, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Looking at the template discussions, it seems Keraunos (talk · contribs) made similar arguments to ThunderBrine back in 2010, although the former stopped being active in 2013. It looks like one the motivators driving these oddly specific templates/lists is a desire for completeness, reflected in trying to fill out 'missing' articles and templates for all the tertiary colours.

1. One problem with this the tertiary colours don't actually have well-established names in English. I've far more often heard "lime" or simply "yellow-green" than "chartreuse", for example. Who decided that the colour between green and yellow is "chartreuse"? And who decided that the other colours between yellow and green are shades of chartreuse? Why, of all the named colours between yellow and green, is "chartreuse" at the top of the hierarchy? Why not have "chartreuse" be a shade of "lime"? Why is this arbitrary terminology being pushed as a norm or standard? There is nothing objective, normal, or standard about this nomenclature as far as I can tell. Is this original research? I'm not really sure how you would go about establishing the common names here.
2. Another problem is the assumptions about tertiary colours are faulty. The tertiary colours end up the same whether you use favour additive RGB or subtractive CYM, but what if you use the traditional subtractive RYB model? The working assumption seems to be that RYB is objectively obsolete and should therefore be ignored, but it's still a widely used model especially among artists and it's widely taught to children (for various reasons). Additionally, the opponent-process model challenges the assumption that there are only three primary colours. The number of tertiary colours and which colours they happen to be depends on your choice of colour model; there is no objectively correct approach even when setting aside the problem of terminology.

tl;dr - Even ignoring the problem of exact colour coordinates and hue angles, the number of basic colours that should have "shades of" articles, their hierarchy, and their names can all be disputed. The working assumptions behind the current situation are fundamentally faulty. – Scyrme (talk) 21:47, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

I too was struck by chartreuse but I let it pass as other colour names in mapping schemes, magenta for instance, are not often found in common speech but clearly have some provenance. In the case of chartreuse, however, that is not so clear. Our color wheel article has numerous examples of historical colour wheels going as far back as the 18th century. Every one of these names the colour as green-yellow or yellowish green (or the equivalent in another language). I'm getting similar results in gbooks. Chartreuse is not seen in our article images until we get to the Wikipedia generated colour wheels. That is beginning to look like a Wikipedia invention, or at least something quite rare. Books on art and design do describe chartreuse and where it is on the colour wheel, but it is usually described as a pastel or darkened colour rather than a fully saturated colour eg . SpinningSpark 08:53, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

• Revert all the edits. As shown in the army green redirect discussion, this is WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH as it was not supported with any proper sourcing that "army green" is "yellow". WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS applies to the thinking that moved these things just because of a theoretical non-human color scale. It is not how a logically structured world would classify things, but how the world actually classifies things that the encyclopedia documents. Wikipedia is WP:NOT a research journal. -- 64.229.88.43 (talk) 21:39, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

• I broadly agree, but being charitable, the hue angle approach has the benefit of being unambiguous (assuming you can quantify the hue in question). If we decide to put things where people actually intuitively put them, that raises the issue of whose intuitions to follow. The references won't necessarily agree on whether a particular shade is yellow or green. Problems may arise with editors adding redundant or duplicated material, or moving material arbitrarily between articles to "correct" the placement in line with their preferred sources (or their own intuitions). – Scyrme (talk) 22:16, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

• We have extensive guidelines on how to deal with reliable sources that disagree. We can mention both viewpoints, but avoid giving WP:UNDUE attention to a minority or rare system. SpinningSpark 09:01, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

• Don't those concern content within an article, rather than where the content should be in the first place? – Scyrme (talk) 10:32, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

• I don't agree with that. WP:V and WP:NPOV will prevent you from writing an extensive description of Murphy's law in the Scientific law article. Plainly, mainstream reliable sources do not classify Murphy's law as a scientific law. That remains true even if you can find, as you probably can, some sort of source somewhere that does so make the claim. But it's perfectly acceptable to talk about Murphy in adage. WP:UNDUE explicitly addresses such issues. Likewise, army green should not have an extensive description in shades of yellow if sources generally call it a shade of green. If mainstream sources disagree, then WP:BALANCE comes into play. SpinningSpark 11:06, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

• (Responding because of the ping, even if I'm not an expert (or even active) in color related articles.) All these moves by ThunderBrine look like a bunch of WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH combined with a dose of WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS. I don't know how far back their moves go, but based on the arguments I've seen and the moves I've noticed, I'd go with a "revert all", placing the onus on ThunderBrine to demonstrate why any specific ones should not be reverted. -Ljleppan (talk) 13:33, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Discussion 2

• I understand if the viewpoint I'm supporting, whether true or false, may not be supportable on the public site. However, before the community decides to change the pages drastically, I would still like to go over some things.

  @Scyrme is correct. I still wish for a sense of completeness and logical structure. I did not like how orange was the only tertiary color to be "glorified" as to get documentation in the same way as the primary and secondary colors. It also felt right to do because the blue and green page were extremely vague in their color classification, which is likely because they are primary colors, and technically any color within their 120 degree range could be classified as that color. Yellow and cyan are types of green, magenta and cyan are types of blue, etc. However, red's page is seeming more strict in classification. I assume the colors magenta, rose, orange, and yellow (all commonly known color names) are to blame for stripping red of its potential vaguely expansive page. However, we didn't have commonly accepted names for yellow-green, green-cyan, cyan-blue, and blue-magenta. Sure, they may be sourced (which is how I found them), but are not commonly known. So I took the names that was already accepted by Wikipedia (Chartreuse, Spring, Azure, Violet), and started working in order to complete the set. The names themselves didn't matter, but what they represented mattered. The contents that were moved to them could easily be moved to another page if that page had a name that carried the meaning behind it. Orange, the infamous tertiary color at the source of this debate, was the name of the color that represented a random fruit, and the classification of this specific color could have easily gone to another red-yellow colored object, but since it was accepted by fellow intellectuals (like everyone here), it is used commonly; Again, I worked on what was already in use and accepted, and tried not to pluck the names out of thin air. Some were easy to transfer with minimal infighting (usually a debate of this nature on Wikipedia wouldn't take 2 years to be brought up, given the puntual staff here): For example, many colors moved to chartreuse fit the logical HSV/HSL mathematics, but they were additionally referred to as "yellow-green" or "olive-green", which in a way was kind of a 'dog whistle'.

  1. TANGENT:If they are sourced that way, I would prefer if they are moved/kept in their appropriate pages; If they aren't, then I would have no argumentative power to object (in the case that the viewpoint I'm supporting is not being supported).
     • I doubt that any such mercy will be given to green-cyan's colors (Spring), but "bluish-green" or "mint" could be considered dog-whistles for it, however cyan also has such dog-whistles. Azure will have a difficult time, as lots of people already see cyan as "just blue", instead of it's own color; cyan-blue, while a distinct tertiary color in RGB/CMYK, will probably not have many stragglers. Violet, aka blue-magenta, while it may be incredibly established, would have to contend with name "Purple" for the content that looks like it, as Purple's name already has a lot of backing. Finally, Rose's dog whistles are "red-magenta" or "red-pink"—given magenta has been referred to as neon pink before.
  2. TANGENT: To argue against counter-intuitive design, the color, Olive has been sourced multiple times by multiple sites to be yellow or yellow-green (mostly by marketing sites—who tend to deal with graphic designs—, home interior sites, and color sites for artists, who all deal with color extensively). Also, in a way, if olive is yellow, than "olive-green" is just yellow-green, which is chartreuse. Oddly, it has also been sourced as brown because of its dark and dull color. --ThunderBrine (talk; contributions; watchlist; sandbox) 02:07, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

On the "glorification" of orange, research has shown that orange appears very early as a named colour across all cultures and languages. It's at no.5 according to this paper. The peak wavelength in humans of the L cone (red) and M cone (green) are very close together compared to the S cone (blue). Colours between these two peaks (yellows and oranges) are thus much easier to distinguish in the same way that frequencies of audible tones are easier to distinguish in regions where auditory hair cells are closer together. it is thus not so surprising that we view orange as a distinct colour. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spinningspark (talk • contribs) 10:11, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

The Shades of... articles were clearly never meant to conform to a technical definition. A shade (color) is a different brightness of a given hue. It does not include variations in hue and saturation, but all our Shades of... articles explicitly say that they do so include them. Pink is not technically a shade of red, it is desaturated red which is a different thing altogether. It is being bull-headed to impose technical restrictions on articles that are based on perception. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spinningspark (talk • contribs) 10:11, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

PS, see the discussion that decided to rename these articles as shades of... in the first place. I argued against it for exactly the reason of this confusion. SpinningSpark 13:55, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Color/Archive 4#Various proposals pertaining to the Shades of ..._templates & categories, which has a bunch of summary on older discussions on shades vs variations vs tones vs hues of etc. And is also part of why various "shades of " articles got split out of some of the larger color articles. In hindsight I wonder if something that side stepped the different definitions of "shade" such as "Red colors", "List of red colors", or "Colors that are red" might have been a better choice. PaleAqua (talk) 14:56, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

It was originally called Variations of red which was a perfectly fine title for its contents as far as I'm concerned. The change was not for the better. SpinningSpark 16:42, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Looking at the past discussions linked above, I don't see a good reason given for favouring "shade". I don't agree with the arguments made that "variations" is in some way more peculiar than "shades"; they are just as natural as each other, and if you do an online search you'll find plenty of pages using both interchangeably on the same page. Neither would be unrecognisable in vernacular discussion. It was noted in the discussion that "shades of" is more common phrasing but those statistics can't distinguish different senses of the same word; this is especially relevant when questioning common vs technical use.

When the use of a word varies in the precision of its meaning, it's usually better to go with an alternative which doesn't as that makes the scope of the article clearer, and prevents content in the article being misunderstood or becoming contradictory due to mixing up definitions (which is made more likely when a variety of references is used). "Variations" or "varieties" would be practically better titles for these reasons.

In one of the earlier discussion linked it was suggested that "varieties" better emphasises that the article concerns a cluster of associated colours rather than produced by modifying or varying some definite, basic, or ideal colour (or hue). Given the current situation has been based in part on assuming the latter interpretation, that might be worth considering if we agree that the scope of these articles should instead be the former interpretation.

"List of [adjective] colours" may better suggest a cluster of associated colours than either "variations" or "varieties" since it explicitly refers to "colours" in plural. However, "[adjective] colours" is comparatively less common phrasing than the other options. – Scyrme (talk) 21:15, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Our lightness article has something to say that may be very relevant to the classification of olive. Because of the shape of the cone response S-curve, when the luminance of a colour is reduced, even if its spectral composition remains the same, the different cone responses don't quite change at the same rate with respect to each other. It is plausible therefore that the perceived hue and saturation will change at low luminance levels. This is sourced to and may provide an objective reason why the perception of olive is distinct from yellow. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spinningspark (talk • contribs) 10:11, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Proposal

Proposal - Most of us seem to agree that the "shades of" articles (regardless of title) should exist for well-established basic colours in the English language rather than on some systematic effort to cover all the primary, secondary, and tertiary hues.

• Following that, I'd suggest that there should be "shades of" articles for black, white, grey, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown. Perhaps also indigo, and violet since these are often named instead of purple when listing the colours of the rainbow (ROYGBIV).
• Most of these already exist with corresponding navbox templates, and the more niche lists should be merged into them. Magenta and cyan may be common in technical use, but my understanding is that in vernacular English they are simply shades of pink (cf. "hot pink") and blue (cf. "electric blue") respectively. I don't have strong opinion on keeping them or merging them. As a note, {{Color topics}} currently lists only these "Shades of" articles: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Violet, Purple, Magenta, Pink, Brown, White, Gray, Black

The best case for creating niche lists is that the main lists can get long and cluttered, which impairs easy navigation. To remedy this, I suggest:

• Unsourced or poorly sourced entries should be pruned. The remaining entries should be organised into subsections grouping similar hues to aid navigation, rather than listing them all in one big alphabetical list. However, the sublists can be organised alphabetically. Grouping sections by hue provides a compromise between a systematic approach and a more subjective, cultural approach. The problem of niche titles created by the former is mitigated, since readers can navigate the sublists by eye and ignore any questionable titles. (An improvement over the current situation, since a reader won't necessarily know to search for "shades of chartreuse" or "azure" or whatever.)
• Colours which only exist because a company like Crayola arbitrarily decided to name them should probably be moved to a dedicated list like "List of Crayola crayon colours" rather than being mixed with terms in more general use. Something similar could be done for "official" colours which are arbitrarily defined and named by an institution as a representative symbol. For example, we could have a "List of university colours", organised by hue, rather than cluttering the main lists with entries like "Michigan State University green" (listed as "MSU green" on Shades of green). Such entries are rarely used as a practical colour terms in the English language, and only contribute clutter.

Redirects would be retargeted or deleted accordingly after the content has been moved to its appropriate place. – Scyrme (talk) 22:14, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

• Support seems reasonable, though perhaps a set of criteria based on sources should be set up for the what the basic colors are. For example color terms usually being referred to as another color term in reliable sources. PaleAqua (talk) 04:08, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
• Support sounds good to me. -Ljleppan (talk) 11:24, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
• Support though I would argue for inclusion of cyan as a main color and exclusion of violet, indigo and definitely magenta (fuchsia/magenta are webbed at 300 degrees, so are quintessential purple, not the hot pink at 330deg). -Curran919 (talk) 09:54, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
• Support is appropriate. I would argue that the primary and secondary colors should stay: Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Magenta, along with Black, Grey, White. I don't know what will happen to the tertiary color pages: Orange, Chartreuse, Spring, Azure, Violet, Rose, but if they are deleted (or partially deleted), I wouldn't have a strong opinion.
  Also, if we're cutting down on fat, maybe Purple, Brown, and Pink could be torn apart and redistribute the pieces to the main color pages. I'm just basing it off of {{Color classifications}}. Purple could go in magenta (and/or violet if we're keeping that); Pink could either go in red or magenta (and/or rose if we're keeping that); Brown could go in Red, Orange, and/or Yellow.--ThunderBrine (talk; contributions; watchlist; sandbox) 20:39, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

  Brown, orange, and pink are widely recognised colour cetegories, at least in common speech in English. I think it would be detrimental to have their information scattered in some other article. I'm convinced that few people (other than artists etc who are familiar with colour mixing) think of brown as a variation of orange or red. Few people think of orange as red-yellow in the same way that turquoise is commonly recognised as a blue-green. Pink is never called light red in the way that other pastel tints are such as light blue. These colours therefore have a special place in our perception. At worst, these colours should be self-contained sub-sections in another article with a redirect. That is possible for pink, but the other two have ambiguous targets. Browns can be variations of red or orange. Orange, as a mixture of red and yellow is entirely problematic to choose a redirect target. SpinningSpark 13:34, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

• Support. I don’t support these articles existing as much as others might, but I strongly support the cleanup suggested. As a technician and a teacher I would prefer Cyan and Magenta be treated as more central than Indigo, Violet or Pink, and I see no reason Shades of indigo and violet couldn’t redirect to purple. Depending on the outcome of which colors survive, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to include some of the colors from those groups in multiple Shades of _ articles. — HTGS (talk) 02:12, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
• Support The proposal for the Shades of articles is perfectly sensible, except that we would need to decide how each "Shades of" list will be sorted — in particular, Shades of green would span a wide variety of hues and lightnesses, from tea green to Pakistan green and from lime green to aquamarine. For mergers:
  • Shades of chartreuse and Spring green should be merged into Shades of green.
  • Shades of azure should be merged into Shades of blue.
  • Shades of purple and Shades of violet should be merged into one article, but the name of the combined list is up for grabs. The navbox and category are currently under the violet label.
  • I am undecided whether Shades of magenta should be diffused among Shades of purple and Shades of pink, merged into Magenta as a list of variants, or kept as a standalone article.
  • I am undecided whether Shades of cyan should be diffused among Shades of green and Shades of blue, merged into Cyan as a list of variants, or kept as a standalone article. The case for keeping it is slightly weaker than for magenta.
  • Shades of rose should be merged into Shades of magenta and Shades of red.
  • In the end, we would definitely have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple/violet, pink, brown, white, gray, and black.
  • The category structure should exactly parallel our Shades of articles. In particular, Category:Shades of azure will be merged into Category:Shades of blue, if and only if the article is.
• –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 09:39, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
• Comment The names “cyan” and “magenta” should not be used as generic color terms. These are technical jargon terms invented for CMYK printing (alternate names for "purplish red" and "greenish blue"), and refer originally (and still predominately) to the specific ink colors used there. (To be precise the name "magenta" comes from a dye discovered a few decades earlier, but now predominately refers to the CMYK color.) They were mistakenly added (as almost completely unrelated colors) to the list of HTML/CSS color names by computer programmers who didn’t know what they were doing, where they have caused a lot of confusion. These names are not in widespread use either in society at large or in color reproduction/etc. outside the context of CMYK printing. If you want a list of basic color categories, the most supportable set that would not be original research is the ISCC–NBS system, or perhaps the list of names found by careful ethnographic research by Berlin/Kay and others, see Basic Color Terms. –jacobolus (t) 13:43, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

  Cyan and magenta are as invented as the color orange—they’re just less commonly understood. Yes, they are jargon to a large degree, but they are the most commonly used jargon by any professional working with printed color (and many who do design work but don’t print). I don’t mind omitting them from the core structure of how we plan “Wikipedia’s map of color”, but to omit them from core lists of colors would be silly. As for their actual value, they are the secondary colors in an RGB system; programmers (or displays) may have once rendered them wrong, but those values displayed currently as “web magenta” or “web cyan” are the same colors (if not the same tones or shades) as what I could pour out of my printer’s ink tanks. They’re two FFs plus one 00 after all. They’re central to both the RGB and the CMYK models; the two systems I believe are the most common models used this century. (As for “greenish blue”, maybe I’ve spent too long looking at them, but I can’t recall ever seeing a hint of blue in what is rendered as cyan. I think the average person would read “green+blue” as the mix of two pigments—a sort of teal color—rather than the additive consequent.) — HTGS (talk) 01:27, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

[cyan and magenta] are the most commonly used jargon by any professional working with printed color – yes this is my point, these are not generic color terms, but refer specifically to printer inks. those values displayed currently as “web magenta” or “web cyan” are the same colors – no, these are nowhere close to the same colors. I made an image a few years ago, shown at right, showing the difference in Munsell space. The RGB colors #F00, #0F0, #00F, #FF0, #F0F, #0FF are shown as triangles, while the CMY primaries in a few common CMYK printing profiles are shown as other shapes. You can see that these are nowhere close to each other. Printer’s cyan is a slightly greenish blue (nowhere close to “teal”), whereas the RGB color #0FF is bright blue–green. Printer’s magenta is a purplish red, whereas #F0F is barely on the red side of purple. What HTML calls “cyan” and “magenta” bear nearly no resemblance to their namesakes (they are perceptually about as far apart in hue as “orange” from “red”), and naming them by the same names is an incredibly confusing mess. To the extent possible any reputable source should try to avoid perpetuating / exaggerating the confusion. This is not the same situation as the color “orange” which is now pervasively used throughout English-speaking society to indicate hues about halfway between unique red and unique yellow. –jacobolus (t) 04:08, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Realistically we’re both just pushing our POV on how people “should” think about color, but as I said, Wikipedia’s chosen system doesn’t have to reflect RGB or CMYK. Colloquial understandings of color are fine. There’s no reason to act like cyan and magenta just aren’t colors because you don’t like them though. No, RGB and CMYK spaces don’t typically represent them exactly the same; RGB green doesn’t look like CMYK green either if we’re being that picky though. (NB: not an argument against green… nor was I suggesting that orange should be dropped… nor was I suggesting that cyan == teal...)

I could post a CIE based graph in response to your graph, but we both just have our favored map projections (maybe you like Mercator and I like Kavrayskiy). All I’m pointing out is that cyan and magenta do in fact exist, and are used by probably the majority of the world’s population who work with color (*gestures vaguely at a made up statistic*), and it would be silly to pretend they… don’t exist. — HTGS (talk) 04:45, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

To save folks here from clicking through, here are the basic ISCC–NBS categories:

I largely support this idea for two reasons. Firstly, it gels with my own views on how most people perceive colour categorisation. Secondly, it is based on a recognised classification scheme. My only note of caution is that I am not sure how widely used this scheme is. In particular, is there a danger that we could be accused of being US-centric? Is it even widely used in the US? That is not clear from the article and I'm only seeing limited independent references to it, mostly 1960s or earlier. SpinningSpark 07:41, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

The only very widely used name-based systems are stuff like paint company category schemes or Pantone PMS spot colors, which are idiosyncratic, arbitrary, proprietary, and don’t really try to make themselves useful for generic communication. As far as useful and widespread systems go, the Munsell color system on which the ISCC-NBS system is based is pretty good, but is organized as numerical coordinates rather than discrete categories. From what I can tell, the ISCC–NBS system, despite some original buy-in from color experts in industry and the US national bureau of standards, never really became super widely used, but nor has any other comparable system: for internal industry use, people largely stick to numerical coordinates of one sort or another, and for public communication the prevailing practice continues to be making up random names, often contradictory or nonsensical. Laypeople for the most part don’t use any system at all – but of course do use a variety of loosely defined color names, and if more specificity is desired will add qualifiers, “banana yellow”, “blood red”, “robin egg blue”, “clover green”, or whatever. I think the ISCC–NBS system would still be better than the current practice on Wikipedia pages which is based on arbitrary editors’ personal feelings, both as a useful system per se and also for avoiding “original research”. –jacobolus (t) 17:20, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

One final advantage of the ISCC–NBS color name dictionary etc. is that as works of the US government they are all in the public domain, so can be freely used however anyone likes. For anyone who wants to look, here is a freely available scan of the 1976 version at the internet archive, and here is a scan of the 1955 version. –jacobolus (t) 17:25, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

I should add here, that while not used ubiquitously, it’s also not like the ISCC–NBS system has been completely forgotten or never gets used today. E.g. a google scholar search turns up more than 2000 references in the academic literature since 2000, more than 1000 of which have been since 2015 (for comparison, "pantone" has 10x more mentions). jacobolus (t) 17:54, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

L Looking at Pantone is not very useful here. It's true that it's widely recognised and used (I've used it myself to specify colours of products in my professional life) but it's not a categorisation system, which is what we need here. SpinningSpark 20:02, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

I agree, we could use the ISCC-NBS scheme, which is well-demarcated and hence satisfies WP:CALC without creating duplication of entries due to crosslisting. We would begin with the 13 Level 1 descriptors, sectioned according to the Level 2 and Level 3 categories, of which there sre respectively 29 and 267. But how would we handle RS which describe a color differently than ISCC-NBS does, and placement of closely related colors that fall into different categories? For example,   Olive Drab is described in various terms in its section of Olive (color); the ISCC-NBS classifcation is strong yellow green. Two colors based on newer US Army standards,   Olive Drab Camouflage and   Olive Drab #7, also appear in the same section, with respective ISCC-NBS descriptors grayish olive and dark olive. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 07:34, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

If we are going to use the ISCC-NBS classification, we should stick rigidly to it and make that clear in each article lead. This issue with olive drab being used as a name for different colours in different places is the very thing a standard categorisation scheme is meant to solve. The colour should go in the article or section that corresponds to its ISCC-NBS block. Both grayish olive and dark olive will live on the Olive (color) page so there is no big problem there. If we want to feature someone else's version of olive drab that does not belong on the Olive page, then a see also from that page is the way to handle it. And there certainly are other versions of olive drab. The British Army paints much of its equipment to British Standard 381c colour   #298 Olive Drab. I once came across a company (naming no names) making equipment for the British Army, but inexperienced in that field, who assumed that Olive Drab meant the RAL color, a standard widely used in Europe,   RAL 6022, which our article calls "Brown olive", but on many English language RAL charts, eg , is described as "Olive Drab". There are so many colour names out there that any attempt to group variations by names disparate organisations and manufacturers have used would be bound to throw up anomalies. There is a fundamental policy reason why we should not group by name. That principle is WP:NOTDICTIONARY. SpinningSpark

The Color Names Dictionary has various colors (from miscellaneous industry catalogs etc.) named “olive drab” listed under the following ISCC–NBS categories: moderate olive brown, dark olive brown, dark olive, grayish olive, olive gray, moderate yellow green (this one is "drab olive"). There is clearly no precise single idea of what color “olive drab” should mean. But if you want some definition, the X11 and HTML lists are pretty terrible sources in my opinion. pages 55–59 –jacobolus (t) 18:08, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

"cyan" as a color term appears to predate the the four color process that would eventually become CMYK. References I checked gave 1879 for "cyan blue" and a little later for "cyan" by itself but couldn't find the use that the referenced back to. I checked contemporary dictionaries, such as the 1886 Webster's (see page 328), which while not yet including "cyan" or "cyan blue" have "cyanean" and "cyanometer". Speaking of magenta seems like https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/121 might be a good source for that article. PaleAqua (talk) 12:51, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Being able to find cyan as a colour term in the 19th century is beside the point. The real question is was it being used as a basic colour category rather than a particular colour? I can find references to banana as a colour (apparently it was a new tint in 1891 fashion) but that does not mean we should use it as a basic category. SpinningSpark 13:45, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

I was responding to comments that they were not generic color terms and only defined in relation to CMYK. I agree neither cyan nor magenta should be used as basic color categories. Many of the sources I'v seen have "cyan" as a "blue" color, and "magenta" as a "red" color. As for ISCC-NBS, I agree it one of the better the option we have for categorizing color terms. Having a clear reliable source based approach continues to be my preference. PaleAqua (talk) 14:19, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

The word cyan (κύανος) is an Ancient Greek word for “blue”. I am not suggesting that it was never before used as a color name in English, but as far as I can tell though, neither “cyan” nor “magenta” was in common currency in the 19th century as a generic color word. They were picked out as jargon alternatives to “blue” and “red” to describe these kinds of printer inks because calling them “red” and “blue” would be confusing, since these are noticeably different from the unique hues red and blue. (Similarly, it was in my opinion a mistake to call RGB display primaries “red”, “green”, and “blue”, because this also causes significant confusion as these colors are also not all that close to the unique hues red, green, blue. Using ISCC-NBS categories as clear descriptive names, these primaries are R = “orangish red”, G = “yellowish green”, and B = “purplish blue”, but I think it would have been better to find/invent jargon names for them.) Wikipedia trying to turn those ink colors into generic color categories is at least approaching “original research” / violating a “neutral point of view”. –jacobolus (t) 16:16, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

• Another comment Mylonas, Stockman, and Griffin (2018) "Basic Colour Terms are indispensable" suggests a number of other important papers to look at about color terms, which may be helpful for anyone looking for reliable sources.
  • Berlin, B., & Kay, P. (1969/1999). Basic color terms : their universality and evolution. Stanford, Calif.: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
  • Boynton, R. M., & Olson, C. X. (1987). "Locating basic colors in the OSA space". Color Research & Application, 12(2), 94–105.
  • Lindsey, D. T., & Brown, A. M. (2014). "The color lexicon of American English". Journal of Vision, 14(2), 17.
  • Mylonas, D., & MacDonald, L. (2016). "Augmenting basic colour terms in English". Color Research & Application, 41(1), 32–42.
  • Gibson, E., et al. (2017). "Color naming across languages reflects color use". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201619666.

  –jacobolus (t) 03:53, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

  I got a bit distracted and didn't realise this discussion was still continuing. I just read through it earlier tonight. Coincidentally, I did spend 2 days last week cleaning up the color term article that includes discussion on definition of basic color terms. The article did and still does rely heavily on Berlin and Kay, but I don't hear much criticism on their use of basic color terms (only on their conclusions on linguistic relativity). Important in the color term article is the distinction between colors in natural language and color systems. It seems like most of the discussion here has been focused on finding a system (or making our own system), but the definitions of 11 basic color terms of Berlin and Kay seems like an obvious foundation. Contrary to my original post in support of cyan/teal, it is not (yet) at basic color term level. ISCC-NBS has the same 11 basic color terms and adds olive and yellow-green. This makes sense if you want to base your system on being more perceptually uniform (there are waaay more colors included in 'green' than 'orange', so divvying up green makes sense), but for wikipedia's purposes, that shouldn't factor in. Having yellow-green and olive achieve the same status as red and blue defies the natural lexicology of color. It may be worth looking into some of the other references you've listed here, to see if they have good arguments for deviating from the Berlin/Kay stage VII basic color terms. Curran919 (talk) 22:36, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

  If we want to have “shades of X” articles (under whatever name), it would still be helpful to include those in-between categories for the sake of keeping lists a bit more manageable. Having a single category “green” including every color with hue from say Munsell 3GY all the way to 10BG gets incredibly unwieldy, and the colors near the edges are increasingly unlikely to be categorized as “green” by typical English speakers with normal vision. (I even think the ISCC–NBS scheme would have benefitted from adding one more “blue-green” hue category in addition to greenish blue and bluish green; note this category still wouldn’t include cyan, which would still be considered “greenish blue”.)

  However, even if we used ISCC–NBS categories they wouldn’t necessarily have to each be a separate article. I could imagine e.g. a “shades of green” article containing separate top-level sections for {yellow-green, olive green, yellowish green, green, and bluish green}, while a “shades of yellow” article could contain top-level sections for {orange–yellow, yellowish brown, yellow, olive brown, olive, greenish yellow}.

  If we do decide to use ISCC–NBS categories for this, we should (a) try to make a good software tool for looking up ISCC–NBS category based on other color coordinates which includes implementing a good inverse Munsell Renotations lookup, (b) make [or take from the NBS book] some better diagrams showing how the ISCC-NBS regions are spatially organized (in Munsell space), (c) look at the sources of the Color Names Dictionary (Ridgway, Taylor/Knoche/Granville, Maerz/Paul, Plochere, etc.) and try to extract exact colorimetric/Munsell coordinates corresponding to their color names and save those in a publicly accessible data file somewhere (e.g. in a github repository), and possibly try to find other “reliable” sources linking colorimetric coordinates to color names from ethnographic research, natural sources (birds/flowers/etc.), industry, or whatever. The list of e.g. X11 and HTML/CSS colors is garbage from a WP:RS and WP:NPOV perspective, made by incompetent amateurs who did little if any research. –jacobolus (t) 01:49, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

  I would say using Berlin and Kay's basic color terms to determine which articles there are and ISCC-NBS divisions (and primary subdivisions) as organizational elements inside those articles takes the best of both worlds... if that's what you meant. I'm more concerned with the high level organization of these articles and designing to avoid bloat, which it seems has been a problem for 20 years in this article space. I'm not really concerned with the precision or comprehensiveness of the colors therein. Curran919 (talk) 07:45, 17 October 2022 (UTC)