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