Abbreviation NGW Type noncommercial Official language English, Dutch | Formation 1996 Purpose heraldic | |
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Headquarters nominally Renkum, Netherlands | ||
Heraldry of the World (or NGW, for the original Dutch name Nederlandse GemeenteWapens (Dutch civic heraldry)) is an Internet-based heraldic resource . 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.
Contents
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 70.000 and the number of images around 135.000, making it the largest website of its kind. Due to the high amount of material there is an editing backlog, causing some areas of the site to contain outdated information.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, 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.