What policies do we have for the politics of names?

Question

Names can be controversial. The government of Burma/Myanmar changed the countries' name to Myanmar, but many people choose to say Burma for political reasons. Another example would be Dersim/Tunceli in Turkey, a Kurdish city officially referred to by its Turkish names. There is no a-political choice.

This answer refers to the name as Tunceli. Personally, I would describe this as Dersim/Tunceli, such as Amnesty International does. We have a meta-question on Burma/Myanmar, but do we have any overall policy on potentially politically controversial names? More concretely, I plunge forward and edit references to Tunceli to Dersim/Tunceli, would this violate any Travel SE policy?

Answer 1

Let's keep the whole thing manageable.

We would have to systematically edit references to plenty of cities, regions and countries. Many of them have several names, because of political or historical reasons.

This site is meant to be about travel not politics.

I recall discussions about the use the word "Palestine" which took us nowhere. Moreover the troll about "georgia-country" is likely to wake up again. And I am waiting for the day when someone asks a question about the city of Wolfsburg.

As a result I am not in favour of systematically editing posts. However, if you feel that an alternative name should be mentioned you can add a comment, as has been done in the post cited above.

Answer 2

This has come up many times, and it's really hard to decide. Obviously, there are two strong schools of thoughts on some of these, and we've had heated discussions in the past (some of the ones I can remember):

• Israel/Palestine
• Arab Sea/Persian gulf/Gulf of Iran/etc
• Burma/Myanmar
• where-the-heck-is-georgia-really
• one day Whanganui/Wanganui is going to come up

among others.

I'd almost argue that we should call it what the OP calls it, as that's where they believe they want to go/ask about. Marcel (in the other answer) is right, we don't want to have to go editing posts all the time, which may then get edited back if someone disagrees, and so on. We should leave well enough alone.

However that doesn't help with tags.... ;)