Julie,
I'm pretty confident that we're going to leave the geographical naming convention
alone.
The radicals complaining about anglicization are most likely trying to score political
points; I don't think they care about the "real" names at all. As Ortolan
suggested satirically, if we always used native names for places in English, these places
would quickly become "lost" to the English-speaking world. (We might write
articles on the various movements that want the West to forget about the rest of the world
and leave them alone.)
I think we can consider the naming issue settled. It's extremely unlikely at this
point that any major change will be made in the foreseeable future.
So the article on Italy will be called [[Italy]] and will start something like:
Italy (or ''Italia'') is a peninsular country in the Mediterranean...
Japan is lucky, because it gets 3 names:
Japan (#* or Nippon) is an East Asian... (sorry, my e-mail program can't show you
the beautiful Kanji characters depicting the sun rising behind the trees, ah the poetry we
miss!)
Ed Poor