Daniel Mayer wrote:
Exactly. I'm surprised this is even an issue. It would beyond silly to only refer to Leningrad as Saint Petersburg in a separate article dealing with the history of the Soviet Union. Likewise it would be very odd to refer to the United Kingdom in an article about the Norman Invasion. Gaul/France along with Constantinople/Istanbul are other examples (as would be Londinium/London, for that matter - Peking/Beijing is a different matter dealing with a change in the accepted English transliteration).
Transliterations can be tricky issues too. Should we always accept the current preferred transliteration, or use historic ones when commonly used? For example, the Greek government and Ministry of Antiquities currently prefers a different transliteration scheme from the one used by most non-Greek archaeologists--Peloponnesos instead of Peloponnesus; Makedonia instead of Macedonia; Ithaki instead of Ithaca; and so on. Should we use the current transliteration or the one that's become common in English?
In the future we will have so much info about the city now known as Gdansk, that the article can logically be broken-up by having all pre-1945 history at [[Danzig]] and all the post-1945 history at [[Gdansk]] (with appropriate brief lead-in summaries to each respective sister article - [[Constantinople]] and [[Istanbul]] are divided in a similar way). In the meantime [[Danzig]] can redirect to [[Gdansk]] and any pre-1945 reference to the city should be in the form of "[[Danzig]]" or the more informative "Danzig (renamed [[Gdansk]] in 1945)."
Part of the issue is one of disagreement over history. The Polish nationalist POV being promoted by one of the editors of [[Gdansk]] is that Gdansk has always been the name of the city, and Danzig was only a name used relatively briefly by the German occupation (1795-1945 or so), and as such should be excised and replaced with the "true" historical name of the city. As far as I can tell, this isn't really what happened, and the city--even when it was part of the Kingdom of Poland in the 16th and 17th centuries--had a majority German-speaking population who called it Danzig. But in any case, what's complicating things is that, unlike with Constantinople/Istanbul, there's disagreement over which name should be used for what period.
Basically, the one POV is that Danzig was an essentially German city, made into a Polish city by the expulsion of the German citizens in 1945; the other is that Gdansk has essentially always been a Polish city, occupied at times by Germans and then rightfully reclaimed by the Poles in 1945. The truth of course is probably neither of those...
This "rewriting history" seems to be a common theme of recent disputes as well. For example, a large part of the Serbian/Croat/etc. dispute on Wikipedia is between people trying to claim certain regions have essentially "always" been Serb/Croat/etc., and so writing the history of various cities circa 200 AD as if they could be reasonably considered Serbian at that time. This phenomenon of retroactively claiming an unbroken succession to well-known historical events is somewhat common and larger than Wikipedia, so it'll take some effort to combat (and perhaps some library research to get good citations to back up what "really happened").
-Mark