Poor, Edmund W wrote:
If "Ivory Coast" ever lose currency - as it no doubt will in years to come - then of course we'll reflect this.
I think it's already happened - as several people on the talk page have mentioned, it's been a long time since they've heard "Ivory Coast". Most organizations that deal with international names have MoSes that require use of current official names; WP is somewhat unusual in specifying "most common", which works well with names familiar to the general public, but breaks down for the less-known. The handful of people who even know about the country are also the ones most likely to respect the country's official stance, and to change their personal usage. "Ivory Coast" will live on in online documents (and skew Google results) long after it has passed out of current speech.
Along the same lines, just a couple weeks ago, I was talking to a waiter who said "I'm from Bombay", to which I said "not Mumbai?", and he snorted that that was just what the politicians called it. But I see our article is under Mumbai anyway...
On some less-controversial article titles, I've taken the position that if "most common" is at all unclear, to pick the official name. The samples of usage from Google, print pubs, etc, have huge margins of error.
Stan