[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] NPOV disputes in Polish-German articles

Fri Oct 31 00:53:26 UTC 2003

On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 06:48:00PM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 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.  :-)

You have wrong idea about the problem. The disputed area wasn't exclusively
Polish or exclusively German at that time. Usually, it's hard to even decide who was
the "majority", as we don't have detailed data from the epoch, and it's known
to differ from town to town. It's also not possible to tell what was the official
language - the concept of "official language" is a recent one - then some mix of
Latin and local languages was used, depending on context. Also, the name of a city
could be the same in both German and Polish at that time, only to diverge later
with phonological changes. "Torun'" is example of a name which isn't originally Polish
nor originally German. According to modern etymology it was Polish name equivalent to
"Tarno'w", later to be imported to German language during times of the Teutonic Order,
then to be reimported to Polish in significantly changed version. "Warta Boleslawiecka"
is another such example, except that reimporting happened after the Second World War.

The only sensible policy is to consequently use contemporary names, with possibly
versions in the other languages parenthesized.