This seems as if it will be a never-ending battle until we add alternate data fields, i.e., "historical place-name," and "modern place-name."
The WikiTree guidelines state: "Applied to locations, this [use their conventions instead of ours] means using place names in native languages and using the names that people at the time used, even if they now no longer exist."
IMHO, knowing the historical place-name is vital. That's the canvas on which genealogy is painted: history, society, and geography. We need to know original place-names, their etymologies, and how those names and associations and political demarcations changed over time.
Conversely, telling me only a 13th century place-name as used at the time may give me no clue where in the world that place is today, and it certainly can't be used--among an almost infinite number of perturbations--for digital mapping capabilities.
I think Magnus has said this before: we need both. Two location fields.
It's not just that modern naming and geolocation and GPS gives us the ability to quickly find what we're looking for. Without that digital standardization we'll never move toward revelationary data: real-time heat maps of population density by surname; patterns of nuclear family movement; even ancient DNA-suggested ancestral habitats. All things critical to One-Name Studies.
Abandoning the original place-names, however, is something we do at the peril of our past. For example, I added a note today to Plantagenet-2 (
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Plantagenet-2), Edward I "Longshanks" of England. The profile states the death as 7 July 1307 in "City of Carlisle District, Cumbria, England."
There was no County Cumbria until 1974, enacted by Local Government Act 1972. At that time the historic County Cumberland's former area was combined with Westmorland and parts of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire to form the new county of Cumbria.
I think we need it both ways. We need the oldest, most period-appropriate date designation, and we need the contemporary, most-approximate GPS coordinate.
We can do both.