User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Time Lord Academy/@comment-188432-20130501210751/@comment-188432-20130507161943

User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Time Lord Academy/@comment-188432-20130501210751/@comment-188432-20130507161943 As its instructions say, 's only, sole, singular function is to suppress a, an or the as found at the beginning of the name. That's it. That's all it does. If the name doesn't contain a prepending article, does nothing. At all. In any way.

The name Sarah Jane Smith contains no articles. Thus, will have no effect. Only will do anything.

In other words, is 100% preferable to  in the case of ordinary names.

The issue in the DWU that this thread was partially highlighting is that some characters aren't known by names, but rather titles — the Doctor being the most obvious example. In this case, where a person is known by a title, and  have the same apparent result, though they arrive at that destination via different routes.
 * says, "Oh look! The word the. I better put that behind the word Doctor."
 * says, "Oh look! Two words separated by a space. I better put the second word in front of the first one."

I think from re-reading this discussion that the problem you're having is that you fundamentally misread the original post.

Your initial contribution to this thread said:
 * Since namesort and titlesort can be used interchangeably except when titlesort is preferred, what is the purpose to namesort? (emphasis added)

And I think you've kept that stuck in your head. But the thing is, my original post doesn't in any way say that and  are generally interchangeable. In three of the four sections of my post, I flatly say, "Use in almost every naming situation." Indeed, the central point of my post is that you should use except for these two edge cases.