History talk:Revised Sortname Style: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 21:12, 10 April 2011

While all input is helpful, what I would really like to focus on first is the structure I'm trying to develop. My big picture questions:

  1. Does a unified table of examples convey the information better? Worse?
  2. Is it important to address "edge cases" in the "core guidelines" (my interpretation of warp's notes)?
  3. If the "Intent" is made clear, and we outline the rules of the "target algorithm" (possibly UCA), will editors be able to use the guideline effectively?

This isn't change for changes sake. If a better guideline doesn't result, I'll scale back my proposal and only fix the Jr/Sr/III thing.



  • Bob Marley & The Wailers wasn't a collaboration; the name of the group was "Bob Marley & The Wailers". The same is true for Bill Haley & His Comets - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haley_%26_His_Comets . Ie, either is equivalent to "Hootie & The Blowfish"; the current split in the table given is factually inaccurate. 99.243.33.163
    • About Bob Marley: fair enough. I assumed, I guess wrongly, that since there's The Wailers, then there's at least a chance that BMatW becomes an NGS collaboration. In any case, I thought it was funny that BMatW doesn't follow the current guideline, and hasn't for years.
      • The guideline was changed in March 2010, and that specifically changed the "correct" sortname for BM&TW. The old sortname was correct, per that version of the guideline (though there were multiple failed attempts to change it to "Marley, Bob & Wailers, The", on the same incorrect assumption that it was a collab.). After the change to the guideline, the sortname was changed to be correct per the new version - it looks like someone's since changed it to the wrong one again. I've just edited to fix it back to conform with the current guideline. 99.243.22.211 19:00, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
        • I'm not sure why, but when I did an edit search for "Edit Artist Sortname" on BM&TW, the most recent one returned is 2005. Still true today, even your edit doesn't show up in that search. User:Caller_number_six
    • About Bill Haley vs. Hootie: you're right (AFAIK). Neither is a collaboration, and neither is treated as one in the current or proposed Sortname Style. Why are they treated differently in the examples? Because, as I understand the current guideline, Bill Haley is a person while there is no "Hootie" in H&TB. So H&TB is treated as a single "name" while BH&HC is treated as a person with a backing/support band.User:Caller_number_six
      • I don't follow the difference you're seeing? H&TB gets sortname "Hootie & the Blowfish", BH&HC gets "Haley, Bill & His Comets", and BM&TW gets "Marley, Bob and the Wailers". All three are consistent with each other (regardless of the 'personhood' of Hootie). Hootie isn't mentioned in 2a because, even if "Hootie" were a person, that name's only one word long, thus it still wouldn't be affected by 2a. (Same reason "The Sensational Alex Harvey Band" isn't also mentioned under 2a; it'd be redundant to the "Guideline 2a overriding guideline 2" mention just above.) 19:00, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
        • Okay, I guess I don't understand what you were referring to then when you said "the current split in the table given is factually inaccurate". Maybe the "connector" column is misleading, but I never meant to imply a "collaboration" in the table. User:Caller_number_six
      • In any case, even if "The Blowfish" was a supporting band, it wouldn't change the sortname. But maybe I'll take H&TB out of the examples, since it's such a "corner case".User:Caller_number_six
        • All three were included because they've been the example corner cases used in various sortname style discussions in the past. 99.243.22.211 19:00, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
    • The reason "collaborations" aren't mentioned in the guideline, current or proposed, is that (AFAIK) NGS collaborations won't have Sortnames, at least at first. User:Caller_number_six

I'm unclear as to why there is a need to specially separate prefixes and suffixes. The goal of a sortname is to have like things sort together; why then is "John, Elton Sir" better than "John, Sir Elton"? 99.243.22.211 19:00, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

  • Do you want Sir Elton John to sort, alphabetically, after Robert John (if there were such a person)? That's what would happen if the sortname were "John, Sir Elton". User:Caller_number_six

Why the change to the "Name of a person in a group artist name" guideline? You're dropping the separator comma where a name has been removed - current guideline: "Hendrix, Jimi, The, Experience", this proposal: "Hendrix, Jimi, The Experience". (Ie, the "where doing so" bit of Typographical guideline #1) Taking the Elton John example above, it now becomes unclear whether "Sir" is a middle name or a prefix. 99.243.22.211 19:00, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

  • I would expect Sir Elton John to sort as "John, Elton, Sir". Family Name, Given Name, Prefix. For The Jimi Hendrix Experience, honestly, I think it's a distinction without a difference. As long as it sorts "Hendrix, Jimi, blah blah blah" it will wind up in more or less the right place. My thinking on this is still evolving, but I favor an "outcome based" guideline over a fixed procedure. Does that make sense? User:Caller_number_six

Typographical Guidelines #3 compared with #s 5-8 of the current guideline, there's a very different intent, and the proposed text is far less clear. The intent of the current guideline is that the resulting sortname be as close to a basic character set (A-Za-z0-9&ßÆ挜ij) latin script as possible. How "logical collation" would be interpreted, conversely, is unclear, and serves a different purpose. Specifically, dropping current guideline #6, wrapping it into proposed typographical guidelines #3, makes it far less clear if the correct sortname would be "49" or "fourty-nine". The same unclarity is created for "Spın̈al Tap", "10,000 Maniacs", "Maroon 5", "trance[]control", "My$t:c DJz" - pretty much any of the current guideline's examples which have stylized characters anywhere but at the beginning of the name. I understand intent #7, but first, these are guidelines, not rules, and second, the way to "simplify" isn't to simply leave such types of cases (which have been added to the guideline over time as they've been brought up on the style list) unaddressed. T Guideline #3 would perhaps address them far more clearly, but the "(if doing so allows an artist's name to be more logically collated)" exception pretty much cancels any of that clarity out. 99.243.22.211 19:00, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

  • My thoughts on "commas" were all wrong. Will be fixed in the next draft.
  • As for addressing lots of specific cases, I hope to make a guideline that doesn't /need/ to address every specific case. But, point taken, the current draft is the worst of both worlds. I think you said it well, "the resulting sortname be as close to a basic character set (A-Za-z0-9&ßÆ挜ij) latin script as possible" and as the idea of an "Intent" section develops, something like that should be stated in pretty much those terms. User:Caller_number_six
  • "Logical Collation" was a way to begin the conversation. I'll try to make that more clear in a future draft. This follows my belief that the guideline should be "outcome based" and not so procedural. User:Caller_number_six

Re articles, how is "would otherwise have been the first word in the sort-order" clearer than "beginning with"? (Ie, intent #6) 99.243.22.211 19:00, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

  • I was trying to interpret the Jimi Hendrix example, where the "beginning" article doesn't move to the end. This is only a first draft, and I expect it to change quite a bit. User:Caller_number_six