[WikiEN-l] NPOV disputes in Polish-German articles

Wed Oct 29 03:38:04 UTC 2003

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)