Response sent to WikiEN-l instead of Wikipedia-l since this is an en.wikipedia
matter.
Jimbo wrote:
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.
Exactly. I'm surprised this is even an issue. It would beyond silly to only
refer to Leningrad as Saint Petersburg in a separate article dealing with the
history of the Soviet Union. Likewise it would be very odd to refer to the
United Kingdom in an article about the Norman Invasion. Gaul/France along
with Constantinople/Istanbul are other examples (as would be
Londinium/London, for that matter - Peking/Beijing is a different matter
dealing with a change in the accepted English transliteration).
In the future we will have so much info about the city now known as Gdansk,
that the article can logically be broken-up by having all pre-1945 history at
[[Danzig]] and all the post-1945 history at [[Gdansk]] (with appropriate
brief lead-in summaries to each respective sister article -
[[Constantinople]] and [[Istanbul]] are divided in a similar way). In the
meantime [[Danzig]] can redirect to [[Gdansk]] and any pre-1945 reference to
the city should be in the form of "[[Danzig]]" or the more informative
"Danzig (renamed [[Gdansk]] in 1945)."
People cannot be divided this way, however. So any ref to Muhammad Ali before
he changed his name would have to be something like "Cassius Clay (who later
took the name [[Muhammad Ali]])".
Just my 2.5 cents.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)