Hello together.
I write in English cause unfortanetly I am not able to speak Croatian:
I noticed that a user has entered or retagged numerous old German names (old_name:de=*) of Croatian cities as name:de (e.g. Changeset: 146588467 | OpenStreetMapChangeset: 147155795 | OpenStreetMapChangeset: 146577408 | OpenStreetMap). These names are definitely no longer common and official in German (see also the Wikipedia page for the corresponding cities). The German OSM data looks like a map from 100 years ago and I think I can speak for all German speakers that we don’t want that either. I would like to revert this edits and would like to ask you if you are okay with this.
Maybe that’s why the tag contains “old”. Whether that’s useful depends on how OSM is used: When navigating today, it may not be useful, but if you read some historical document, and you want to find out where that was, it might make sense.
I have now tried to systematically check the user’s edits.
You are right, the regions should be correct. The German names tagged as name:de for the cities and rivers are outdated.
The user also edited the tags name:pl and name:hu, I don’t know if these names are correct, but according to wikipedia they seem to be outdated as well.
Actually the English Wikipedia page says that the German name of Rijeka is “Sankt Veit am Flaum” (whereas the German page is quite clear this is a historical name only). So it might be a good idea to update that too.
Also alt_names:de and old_names:de tags for towns in Slovenia were changed to name:de, they are also outdated, but the matter is not entirely clear here, e.g. “Marburg an der Drau” is sometimes still used for Maribor: Changeset: 146613084 | OpenStreetMap
seems not really correct - but I am not expert on this topic. For now I asked about sources in Changeset: 147155650 | OpenStreetMap and would recommend revert if no answer will appear soon (or even now, if other names are also dubious)