The first edition of the atlas published after the end of the Cold War contained new names for 10,000 locales. The world, of course, does not go along with every suggestion. Few people acceded to Kampuchea as a new name for Cambodia, and I have yet to notice much support for Mumbai, even though it happens to be the official name of Bombay. But most people eventually agreed to replace Rhodesia with Zimbabwe and Burma with Myanmar. The change from Peking to Beijing meant accepting a whole new system of transliteration, and therefore a new name for every place in China, which we all somehow managed to swallow.
Today there are more names than ever before, and yet there can never be enough.
Things keep coming to light that never had any name at all. Experiments with nuclear accelerators during the past two decades have produced several previously unknown elements. Deciding which names to give the elements numbered 104 through 109 on the periodic table has generated fierce disputes. There is a huge backlog when it comes to the names of species. A Smithsonian researcher estimates that some 30 million faunal species, mostly insects, haven't even been discovered yet.