Heraldry of the World

Heraldry of the World

Logo
Abbreviation NGW
Formation 1996[1]
Type noncommercial
Purpose heraldic
Headquarters nominally Renkum, Netherlands
Official language
English, Dutch
Owner
 Ralf Hartemink
Website www.ngw.nl

Heraldry of the World (or NGW, for the original Dutch name Nederlandse GemeenteWapens (Dutch civic heraldry)) is an Internet-based heraldic resource[2] . Its principal project is the Internet's largest website devoted to civic heraldry, containing comprehensive information about all kinds of coats of arms of (local) government authorities, including countries, states, provinces, colonies, regions, districts, cities, towns and municipalities worldwide. In addition to these the site also has a large literature and reference list and a section on heraldic collector items.

The site started as a Dutch language site on Dutch civic heraldry in 1996, and expanded rapidly to cover all countries in the world as "International civic heraldry", the present name was adopted in 2010. The main language changed to English and only the Dutch part is still largely in Dutch. The site is maintained by the webmaster, but the number of contributors is much larger. To facilitate contribution by others the site is being transferred since 2010 to a wiki-environment. When the transition is finished other users will be able to contribute directly.

Website

The total number of pages on the website is over 50.000 and the number of images around 105.000,[3] making it the largest website of its kind.[4][5] Due to the high amount of material there is an editing backlog, causing some areas of the site to contain outdated information.

A very large part of the civic heraldry images used on Wikipedia originates from the site,[6] which is accepted as long as the appropriate template is used.

Coat of arms

The site uses a logo based on the now obsolete arms of Aasiaat municipality in Greenland, showing a spider web, which is an appropriate symbol for a website.

See also

References

Information mainly taken from the homepage of the site.

  1. ↑ http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Heraldry_of_the_world
  2. ↑ http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Heraldry_of_the_world
  3. ↑ http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Special:Statistics
  4. ↑ http://www.heraldryclipart.com/clipart-links/clipart-links.html
  5. ↑ http://www.heraldica.org/topics/national/
  6. ↑ search on 'ngw' in Wikipedia commons showed 7700 arms taken from the site, March 12, 2012

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 2/17/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.