Hello and dzień dobry,
I am from Dresden (Germany) and my polish isn’t very good so I write in english, sorry.
I was on a short trip in poland near olsztyn and have mapped some stuff. I wanted to visit some places where my grandparents lived and worked in the past.
For this purpose it is very helpfull to know the old german name for a place. So I started to tag some stuff with old_name.
I noticed that this tag isn’t used very often and I began to tag with name:de instead. There is a map at the wikipedia toolserver that renders maps in different languages using these name:xy tags.
http://toolserver.org/~osm/styles/?zoom=12&lat=53.76819&lon=20.45963&layers=0000F0FFB000F0FFF
I asked at the german mailing list and some people feel bad with the tag name:de for these old names, because they think it is not the official german title today and looks not good.
There is some discussion about endonyms and exonyms. Some people say it would be better to use name:old for example:
name=Olsztyn
name:old:1353-1945=Allenstein
The problem is, that i can’t say for every place when it was created. Besides it is not so easy to work with these tags to create maps.
My personal feeling is, that name:de is a very good solution and doesn’t look bad. At the end I would like to ask you about your opinion.
Thank you and have fun with OSM
Christoph