I don’t think or perceive it is considered secret, that’s simply how the edit history of almost everything on the site works.
As an aside there are only really 2 cases for associating a common name with a place. One is regional differences in names / spelling within the same language. So for example Canadians can see Canadian spelling vs. US (grey squirrel vs gray squirrel etc), or the name is in a language the site is not translated into.
The original post indicates if it is not done then if you run site in that language you do not see the name. That is not the case, for example I run the site in Danish often, most Danish names are not set to use in Denmark, yet it works fine.