Board Thread:The Time Lord Academy/@comment-188432-20130501210751

is a helpful little template which should be added to the bottom of almost every page about an individual — real world or otherwise. It automatically sorts the page within categories along the proper lines. (And, yes, it is still necessary and effective even though we've got some — backup — javascript category sorting going on.)

There are, however, two special "s" I wanted to highlight today.

Multi-word job titles
If you have a person who is known by a multi-word job title, rather than a true name, do not use . The perfect example of this problem is Television announcer (The Chase). If you use, it'll return a pattern of "announcer, Television The Chase". This is not a particularly helpful sorting. So if you leave off, the sort will be at "Television announcer (The Chase)" — which is what we want.

Note this problem is only for multi-word job titles. should be used:
 * where the job title is only one word, like Waitress (Random Shoes)
 * where a proper name precedes a dab term, like Adam Smith (director)
 * and in practically every other case

People with prepending articles
This being the Doctor Who universe, there are plenty of characters who follow the naming pattern of the Doctor. You know the type: the Master, the Monk, the Rani. As long as they have only one word other than the article in their name (excluding any dab terms), then you can use either or. However, if they have multiple words, then you should use. This is such a rare case — because it's heavily discouraged to have the in a PAGENAME — that I can't actually think of any examples.

But here's the theoretical difference. Imagine there were a page called "The John Smith". If you used, you'd end up with a sort key of "John Smith, The". That would clearly be undesirable. would instead result in the proper "Smith, John The}}.

Generally, stick NameSort on every page
As the documentation makes clear, it's a versatile little template which works in almost every case. You're encouraged to read that documentation to learn more. 