Mirko Thiessen wrote: To be fair to those working on the Polish-German articles, this is quickly becoming a major problem with all articles relating to ethnic disputes on Wikipedia. Some I remember: * [[Macedonia]], [[Aegean Macedonia]], and [[Republic of Macedonia]] -- There is a country that calls itself the Republic of Macedonia, and a Slavic ethnic group who call themselves Macedonians, while Greeks consider both of these misnomers, claiming that the term "Macedonian" refers to a subset of Greek people, much like "Peloponnesians", "Athenians", or "Spartans", and so referring to Slavs as "Macedonians" is just plain wrong. * [[History of Bosnia and Herzegovina]] and related articles -- Some people want the article to be about the historic region of Bosnia; others want it to cover more topics; there's disagreement over what exactly to cover and how. Lots of Serb vs. Croat vs. Muslim nationalism. And of course [[Israel]] and related articles are in a perpetual state of dispute. The best solution I can see to these is to have some people who are relatively neutral take input from the various sides, try to research the facts independently a bit, and then mediate the dispute. I've tried this a bit with the Polish articles (not being Polish or German), but since it's not my area of expertise I've invariably made a few mistakes and antagonized some people in the process. I think one of the major issues is what names to use for places that historically had different names than they currently do. My personal preference would be to use the name at the time of the event being documented, with a parenthetical note of the current name. To pick a relevant example, "Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig (modern-day Gdansk)". If the ethnicity of a particular person is reliably known, I'd defer a bit to their names as well: a German born in that city in the 18th century should probably be said to have been "born in Danzig", while a Polish person born in that city at the same time period should probably be said to have been "born in Gdansk." I'd also tend to use only the contextual names in most articles where it makes sense: for example, an article on the 13th century Byzantine Empire can just talk about Constantinople: it doesn't need to keep saying "Constantinople (present-day Istanbul)". Perhaps since it's such a well-known city that one hasn't been a major issue, but there have been some others that are issues (for example, using Slavic names in articles on the Macedonian Empire, despite the fact that those names hadn't even been invented at the time; or using the old Arabic names when discussing modern-day Israeli cities). But as for solving the conflicts themselves -- ethnic conflicts are much older than Wikipedia, so I doubt we're going to come up with a magic bullet. But we can keep on top of things hopefully, with the NPOV dispute page and non-aligned mediators. -Mark