All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part VIII

[robkelk]

We could edit the template, sure. We'd just need to update the existing uses of the template so that they wouldn't be broken if the template is changed.

I'm old enough to remember how telephone books sorted entries:

• Ignore articles (a, an, the, le, la, les, and so on) at the beginning of the name but keep them in the remainder of the name
  
• Ignore spaces
  
• Ignore punctuation
  
• Ignore case
  
• Treat accented characters as non-accented characters
  
• Spell out numbers
  

(Although that last condition has ambiguities - for example, does one spell "1984" as "one thousand nine hundred eighty four" and sort it under O or as "nineteen hundred eighty four" and sort it under N?)

On the freebie wiki, we're using the "ignore articles at the beginning of the name" and "treat accented characters as non-accented characters" rules, but otherwise sorting by Unicode UTF-8 order (which means sorting on spaces) ... although I am cheating slightly by giving all index pages a defaultsort key of a single space so that they appear together in category listings.

I like the "ignore articles at the beginning of the name" rule, and I know Bob also uses it - but we grew up with it. Has anybody commented on it one way or the other? If general users hate it, we should stop implementing it; if general users like it or don't care, we should continue implementing it and get those "A " pages where they belong.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012