Ok, thanks
As another possibility, the wikidata key can be used, and then in wikidata one can record (among other things) how name changed (even multiple times) throughout the years (docs & example).
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Uh, thanks, yes I think that I will do that! Normally they are already present on wikidata as aliases of the label in italian, but this way is better I think 
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Ok, I have another question: Until the 1970’s in Italy was common for state and regional institutions to still use the old maps of the 1930’s. An example is here https://www.regione.fvg.it/rafvg/export/sites/default/RAFVG/ambiente-territorio/pianificazione-gestione-territorio/FOGLIA1/allegati/PURG_Vol3_Tav4_50000.pdf, which is a part of the regional plan of 1978. At least for what regards the area outside the italian border, the map is clearly from the 1930’s, as you can see from the fact that Nova Gorica simply… doesn’t exist XD
So of course there are also all the old toponyms, and some of them have even been imported to OSM. The question is: are these maps enough to mark these toponyms as in use, and therefore put them as “name:it”, or should they be moved to old_name:it too?
Have there been any maps since 1978 that show Slovenia in this detail? How do they refer to these places? I don’t know any Italian, but in the languages I know, 45 years would usually be enough time for customary usage to change dramatically, and common sense would prevail over any map in particular.
The maps that I’m using (dated respectively 2014, 2008, 1985) have a slight higher scale (1:80 000 the one of 2014, 1:100 000 the one of 1985), but they show much less exonyms (the exonyms about smaller villages/brooks/peaks of secondary importance have been abandoned). Of course there are online forums of die-hard nationalists who dream to have the eastern lands lost in 1945 back and they make these long lists of italian toponyms of the “terre irredente” taken from these maps (funny thing about it is that for a lot of those places exist a lot of italian toponyms, from the XIXth century for example, but they constantly take only the ones from the 1930’s, in many cases made up by some bureaucrat), but I don’t think that we should take example from them. That it’s actually the reason why I started as an it.wiki admin to enter this matter back in 2021, seeing it as an obvious violation of the NPOV pillar, especially after reading two academic sources which portraited that kind of usage of italian exonyms in Slovenia as problematic (see View of Semantic Demarcation of the Concepts of Endonym and Exonym and Vista de Geographical names in the languages of official minorities in Slovenia). I know that the logic behind OSM is in part different from wikipedia, where the sources and their level of reliability are absolutely central, that’s why I’m asking for advice here step-by-step. The “locals have priority” here may be not relevant though, especially for these areas of the high Isonzo/Soca valley, where there isn’t an italian speaking population to whom it can be asked if they use a toponym or not. Moreover, from one macroscopic case that I know (Nova Gorica, which in Italy is everywhere known with the slovenian endonym, all maps, encyclopedias, atlases, etc use it, all the media use it, especially now that it’s going to become the european culture capital for 2025, and here on OSM the name:it is “Nuova Gorizia”, which I think was probably used only until the 1950’s-60’s) I’m pretty sure that this italianization is not something that comes from the common usage of the neighbouring population, but from a clear campaign.
This thread about World War II–era German exonyms might be of interest:
From my admittedly less informed perspective, it sounds like these names should be qualified by old_name, alt_name, or something else that would allow data consumers to know that these names are not straightforward modern names for the places, used by Italian speakers in general.
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Yes, I completely agree. I have also read that among the german speaking community here on OSM there have been a lot of discussion on the issue during the years (whereas for italian is a relatively recent issue, since these italianizations have been made on OSM mainly since 2020). Of course the problem is where to set the bar, since you have clear cases on both sides (places still universally known with their exonyms on one side, and exonyms not present anywhere after the end of WWII), but also many shades of grey. As I said above I’m using the it.wiki policy, which is the result of fifteen years of bloody discussions and that I think is a good compromise: very liberal when it comes to accept an exonym (it is sufficient that one reliable source published in the last 50 years uses it), but very strict when it comes to define which sources are acceptable (only encyclopedias, atlases and maps). And then of course you have borderline cases as the map that i posted above: made in the 1930’s and merely “recycled” in 1978 with only minor necessary adjustments like the new state border (I’m excluding it, since I think it’s contrary to the spirit of the policy since the cartographer that made it, made it basing himself on the toponyms of the 1930’s, the people that reused it in the 1970’s where interested in making the regional environmental plan, not in the old toponyms). But of course the OSM community could make other decisions… I see my action here as an anti-NNPOV action necessary in the short term to stop a one-sided campaign, and therefore I’m using a policy which I find good and that I know well, but then in the long term the decision about which criteria should be used by OSM, it should be IMHO a decision taken by the whole OSM community, better if with criteria valid for all the languages.
Why? How else you would tag case where place used to have common Italian name but it does not have anymore?
Or where mapper has info about past name, knows it is really not used commonly anymore and is unsure which name applies now?
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I don’t know, I’m only telling you the rationale that this group of users has used in the last years to revert other mappers that before me found these names completely out of time and tried to move them to “old_name:it”. I thought that it was a general OSM rule or something, if it was a made-up rule, it’s even worse I would say… The solution that I adopted was to put as name:it the name in slovenian, and then to move the older name in italian to old_name:it.
I’m not sure if I understood the second part of the message, but I’m using modern maps to verify if the exonym is still used or not, I explained the procedure in detail above… To verify that the older names are not made-up I’m using two maps from the 1930’s, which I’m sure it’s also the source of the users who put these names on OSM.
The name:it is a tag to store the name of the POI (in this case a toponym) when speaking in Italian.
It could be present even if the name used in Italian is the same as the Slovenian.
And it is actually better if it is present even if it the same name (otherwise there would be no way to understand if the tag name:it is missing because the information is missing or because the name is the same).
I do not know the area at all. What I written is just the only way to have the name:<lang> to work
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I fully agree with @AnyFile
Use the archaic Italian name for old_name:it and the modern Slovene name for name:it in this case.
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As others have mentioned, unless the place has become unmentionable in the Italian language 
, it has an Italian name, but the name might be identical to the name in another language such as Slovenian. There’s no universal rule that says the name:* tag in a particular language must be derived a certain way. However, different languages have different levels of tolerance for foreign borrowings. Some languages like English and Latin tend to apply certain transformations to a name when borrowing, such as stripping diacritics. In some languages, maybe Italian, the level of tolerance for foreign borrowings may vary by the speaker’s background.
No, in modern italian maps and atlases usually languages which don’t need a transliteration remain written in the same way with their ž, č, and so on, so that’s not an issue (we even use letters that are not present in the “base” latin alphabet when transliterating russian for example). It’s different only for the macron in japanese and other languages, that usually falls (so Tōkyō becomes Tokyo).
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My changes (Node History: Poljubinj (1445112968) | OpenStreetMap) and those of many other users (Changeset: 140572889 | OpenStreetMap), that have pointed out that those names are not used anymore, have been reverted (most probably by the same user that originally inserted them) without any kind of discussion and with a rationale that seems, at least to me, in contrast with the general guidelines that regolate the tagging on OSM (we should use names that the people actually use, not latin names and so on…). What can I do?
Have you invited them in changeset comments to this thread?
Those were some of the few edits that I made before opening this thread as I noticed that the issue was involving a lot of places, so no. I made a reference to this thread only in the following edits.
Anyway the edit war is taking place since a lot of time ago in a lot of other places, see for example here Node History: Komen (286571767) | OpenStreetMap (places which I did not edit, I want to be clear about that, it’s happening between the user who reverted me and another user)
Oh, and if they ignore changeset comments and continue editing then I would contact DWG and complain about editor refusing to communicate (just about that: mail them changeset comment link, link to later edit).
Typical DWG action is 0-hour block that forces user to read message set by DWG.
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I certainly agree to use old_name:it as proposed instead of name:it for old, not more used italian names!