Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
Oh, I thought the original post was about something going on at de.wikipedia, my mistake.
There the German name haters already won ;-( At times, the German "Recent changes" list looks funny: many a lot names completely unknown to me. The strange thing is that they don't step forward renaming also "Straßburg" (Strasbourg), "Mailand" (Milano), "Rom" (Roma), "Venedig" (Venezia), "Kopenhagen" (Kopenhavn), etc.
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...
We agreed to run the so called Google test - but the German name haters deliberately ignored this agreement ;)
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.
This seem like a good solution for the English WP