Jimmy Wales wrote:
Oh my, well, is the dispute over place names? Or more substantive issues than that?
If the dispute is over place names, then subject to the advice of Germans I know, I am willing to decree what strikes me as the obviously correct solution: things are to be named in the German wikipedia what the majority of Germans call them, and things are to be named in the Polish wikipedia what the majority of Poles call them.
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). This comes up occasionally with other former-German areas as well, such as Koenigsberg (modern-day Kaliningrad in Russia). The non-German supporters generally object to over-use of names that are no longer the official names of the cities, while the German supporters object to what some see as an attempt to rewrite history (for example, by saying that things in the 17th century happened in "Kaliningrad," when no city by that name existed then). The current resolution seems to depend largely on how many partisans each side has: there are few Russian partisans on the English Wikipedia currently, so [[Kaliningrad]] uses the name "Koenigsberg" fairly prominently up until discussing the period it came under Russian rule, while there are more Polish partisans, so the [[Gdansk]] article retroactively applies the name Gdansk to the city's entire history.
-Mark