On Sat, 19 Jul 2008, Ken Arromdee wrote:
"Kiev is also based on the old Ukrainian language spelling of the city name and was used by Ukrainians and their ancestors from the time of Kievan Rus until only about the last century."
An obsolete spelling is not a mistake.
I might also add that 1) Kiev, as a city name, appears in a lot of reference works. There are around 700 times as many Google hits for Kiev as for Tetsusaiga. In other words, having a Kiev article may reflect usage, but is much less likely to *influence* usage. 2) The ratio of Kiev to Kyiv is much more lopsided than the ratio of Tetsusaiga to Tessaiga. For Kiev, it's 9.4 to 1. For Tetsusaiga, it's 1.4 to 1. The rule has to be stretched a lot less when the bad name only numbers the correct one by 1.4 to 1 anyway.