I think there is a need for a full discussion on this matter. The standard can be very difficult to achieve and RJ says, actual practice is a long way from the policy.
There is also a basic incompatibility between putting the historic name into the location field but then having an adjacent link which relies on modern names.
It can be extremely difficult to know just what the place would have been called .The further back you go the more problems arise especially if you know little about the area and it's history.
An example take from somewhere I know a little about. I'm sure that hundreds of similar examples can be found elsewhere in the world.
In the 13th C, people in the County of Toulouse (not at that time part of France) would have spoken in Occitan; not French and not English.
County of Toulouse, translates as Comté Tolosa (I think, certainly Toulouse is Tolosa)
Tolosa; google maps takes you to a town in Spain.
Comté Tolosa is even more confusing because for some reason you end up in a place called Toulouse le Chateau which sounds right but is 700km away in the Jura.
At the moment there is a mixture of location names for the early Counts of Toulouse http://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Special:Surname&s=TOULOUSE&cln=0&order=dobup&u=
Some include the modern name and location ,some have the modern name but the wrong department.(The Jura, I wonder if someone was someone mislead by the village of Chateau le Toulouse?)
I also noted profiles of early individuals, supposedly born in Villefranche de Rouergue.(presumably because the book says they were Counts of Rouergue) However ,the town wasn't built until 1252. The capital of the County of Rouergue is Rodez (Rodes, Roergue in Occitan)
It is a minefield trying to get it right .I've lived there which is the only reason I see these anomalies .It would take a real specialist to use the correct name for each date.
It would make more sense to at least try to get the modern place right so it can be correctly linked on the map . Perhaps there could then be another box for the historic place name.