Delirium wrote:
I think that the major dispute isn't over the German and Polish Wikipedias, but over place names in the English Wikipedia: when and how prominently to use the historic German names versus the modern Polish names (for example, Danzig vs. Gdansk).
Oh, I thought the original post was about something going on at de.wikipedia, my mistake.
Perhaps we can form a general policy of how to do it, something made in the abstract that covers all the general cases, without reference to German or Polish, and then go from there...
For example, when referring to a place at a time in the past, prefer the name of that time while parenthetically pointing out the current name if the clarification will be helpful to the reader. When referring to a place at a time in the present, prefer the present name while parenthetically pointing out the past name, blah blah blah.
I can't help but suppose that there's a tedious wikipedia policy wiki page on this somewhere. :-)
--Jimbo