On 29/08/2007, Michael Daly <michaeldaly(a)kayakwiki.org> wrote:
I noticed this on Wikipedia and assume it's a
generic MW thing.
In a category of persons, I see the list of articles where some persons
are listed under the first letter of their first name and others by
their last name. E.g.:
A
John Adams
B
Barney Rubble
I looked at the [[category:..]] statements in the articles and couldn't
see anything that could explain it. How does it decide whether to use
first or last name and how does it know it's a name of a person and not
just a two-word article name?
It doesn't; it sorts according to the category sort key as defined by
the categorisation, e.g.
[[Category:Foo|Adams, John]]
This is often set using {{DEFAULTSORT}}, which is handy if you've got
an article about a person, and a lot of categories.
Rob Church