On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 23:44, james duffy wrote:

Just to let everyone know that Susan/Lir whomever else they are, has unilaterally decided that the system of names on lists is wrong and should be reversed to read {surname}, {name}, rather than the current {name} {surname}. When I pointed out (after Zoe and I had reverted the previous tamperings on the List of Polydactyls page) that all the lists were in the {name} {surname} format, He/she revealed that they have so far modified at least a dozen of the pages to confirm to what I suppose we should call the Lir-ipedia Method.

Any thoughts? Ignore it? Challenge Susan on it? Revert changes?

While there is a certain temptation to revert anything Lir (by any name) does on principle, this isn't a Lir issue at all but a general one.

Long lists of names by alphabetical order *are* more easily scanned visually if presented in "Last, First" / "Family Personal" order. This is primarily because this exposes the sort order in the vertical alignment:

Fa Lihai Fassbinder, Uter Fiddlesticks, Jane Fizzlesticks, Bob Fizzickston, Kelly Fong Liuchang Fottburton, Manny Fotzsmith, Wigglesworth Framsmackle, Otis

is a much easier list to look through than:

Fa Lihai Uter Fassbinder Jane Fiddlesticks Bob Fizzlesticks Kelly Fizzickston Fong Liuchang Manny Fottburton Wigglesworth Fotzsmith Otis Framsmackle

though about as good might be: Fa Lihai Uter Fassbinder Jane Fiddlesticks Bob Fizzlesticks Kelly Fizzickston Font Liuchang Manny Fottburton Wigglesworth Fotzsmith Otis Framsmackle

which would require some ugly table code.

Now, most links are in natural name order, which is as it should be -- most mentions of people are going to be in context, not in lists; natural name order is most appropriate for titles, and most comfortable for most linking, and therefore that is how articles on people are titled.

For the occasional alphabetical lists where one might want to present Last, First order for western names, that means that the code looks like: *[[Jane Fiddlesticks|Fiddlesticks, Jane]] etc.

This is trivially achievable by simple scripts or regexps in 99% of cases for those who are too lazy to do it by hand, though they need to be checked for exceptions.

Or, one could make a crapload of redirects -- again, either these need to be maintained by hand or semiautomated with a script. They would very rarely be used except in alphabetical lists (including perhaps the alpha index at Special:Allpages).

Alternately, proposed categorization schemes could be used to produce most such categorical lists programmatically. A category relation could be defined with an inherent sortable and/or displayable variant, allowing automatic generation of lists in name-sensitive alpha order, rank order by population, age, area, etc. This would save hand-coding.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)