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