Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130519181606/@comment-7302713-20130520131446

"practically no one knows "Vicki Pallister" or "Polly Wright", but they do know Vicki and Polly."

Yes, but the name Vicki Pallister contains the name Vicki. I'd have a hard time believing that someone looking for Vicki would fail to click on Vicki Pallister.

And, on the chance that they only knew or remembered a last name, Pallister is there too.

But that's not the big issue with pipe tricking names away. Alphabetisation by first name is a problem, whether or not we keep last names.

The big problem is titles. We're not going to alphebitise Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart under B for Brigadier. But we should have the title Brigadier in the box. He's probably the most obvious issues but calling someone by a title with frequency is not uncommon. If we organised by first name/title, we'd have to drop the Madame from Vastra and so on.

Also, alphebitisation by first name is not standard, whether or not people have only one name. People have only one name in other contexts, but the standard is still to alphebitise by last name if there is one.

You're propsing that we adopt a practice that is not a standard in the real world, and if it had some benefit to us, I'd probably be ok with it. But I don't see the benefit and I think it causes other problems.

In the real world, if you alphebitise a list of names, Alan (only name) would come before Adam Smith even though Adam precedes Alan. That's not a problem, that's the just the way alphebitisation by name most commonly works. Yes, we have a few more people with only names here than you standardly find, but so what?

If we're going to take a real world standard and throw it away for a different standard not commonly found in the real world (which is what you're proposing), there should be an obvious benefit. And what's the benefit other than making the box a little less vertically inclined?