Steven: I'm not entirely unsympathetic to this issue, but I believe that this
| suggestion is misguided. Proper names have been translated from
| their original language into others long before English came on the
| scene.

Well, no more. The point is that "long before" the web and Wikipedia were born -- a lot of things were true -- many of them little known. Now its not the case -- on an almost daily basis we edit pages that are also edited by people from Deutschland (hey Erik), Eire (James), (complicated).... ZhongGuo (Samuel), Ceska Republika (xChaos) -etc.etc... The proper name of Africa might be whatever the people of Africa - refer to it - namely "Africa" -- certainly European colonial history plays a role there.

| In English, the capital of the Czech Republic is Prague. This is a
| translation of the name. As you point out, there is some
| momentum in the English to use translations that more closely
| approximate the pronunciation in the dominant language of the
| area. However, language evolves naturally. Wikipedia can declare
| "Prague" deprecated, but it wouldn't make a bit of difference to the
| rest of the English speaking world, and it would make the project
| look silly.
|
| - Stephen G.