Talk:Poet
From Academic Kids
When names are listed in long lists in alphabetical order, it would be easier to find what you were looking for if the names were formatted as Last, First Middle. In fact, I think this is true of all alphabetical lists (the text should be displayed in the order that the alphabetizing was done). If anyone else has an opinion please post is here. If the overall consensis is for the L,FM syntax, I'll change the lists accordingly as I see them. Otherwise the current system is good enough for me as well. Thanks. Rlee0001 22:18 Jul 25, 2002 (PDT)
- All names in the Wikipedia are in the format as they appear on this page. If you change them all to L,FM you'll have to either REDIRECT every name in the 'pedia, or else give every name on this page an alias. -- Zoe
The idea was just to do something like Frost, Robert. A small VB program can be written to do the conversion on the clipboard directly. But like I said, its fine either way. I'm not here to step on toes. It was just a suggestions. I'd be more then willing to do the work if everyone thought it was in the pedia's best interests. Rlee0001 23:32 Jul 25, 2002 (PDT)
- I don't think L,FM is used anywhere else on the 'pedia, and I say good riddance to it. --Brion VIBBER
Well then how about if we start alphabetizing by first name? The idea of alphabetizing is to allow the human eye to quickly scan a long list of varied strings and jump directly to the desired string. My original problem with the current house style is that the Last name column doesn't line up due to the fact that the first names are of varied lengths. Is the position of the last names are staggered the human eye can't scan through the list. We might as well not be alphabetizing at all. Don't get me wrong, I'll follow the current standard of practice. As I mentioned before, its fine by me either way, but I thought it was worth bring up anyways. Rlee0001 00:33 Jul 26, 2002 (PDT)
Followup: Does nobody have a response?
- On your last suggestion - alphabetizing by first name:
- That is not a common practice and I don't think it is a good idea.
- On your first suggestion - changing all lists to Last Name, First Name:
- I do not agree that most people have a problem finding a name when the list is sorted First Name Last Name. We have tables of contents on nearly all the lists (and many of these have compact tocs, which display the alphabet horizontally) which means you can jump straight down to the first letter of the surname immediately, and the sublist cuts down the number of entries you have to read considerably (on some of our larger lists, we even have tocs for the first two letters of the name). Once there, I think only a small number of people would be slowed down by having to read the last name. You obviously think otherwise.
- What about non-English names like Mao Zedong, where his family name is actually Mao, and he is listed under the Ms. Do you list him as Mao, Zedong? People never call him Zedong Mao. Since his first name and last name are reversed in this situation, the order you suggest adds confusion. A perfect example is Lu Xun on Wikiquote begin listed as Xun, Lu on the List of people by name (http://wikiquote.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=List_of_people_by_name#X), even though Lu is his family name. And listed under the Xs instead of the Ls.
- Are we going to list Arc, Joan of, even though everyone knows her as Joan and she would be listed under the Js? Many other people have names with of in them. This again adds confusion.
- The whole concept of accidental links is broken here, although it could be argued that that only applies to prose and not lists.
- I am fairly sure I have seen this discussion (except a much longer one) somewhere on meta already, I just can't find where (if anyone can, please post a link). My memory is not perfect, but on that page I don't think a consensus was reached to change to a new format.
- We are talking about a lot of lists, hundreds in fact, although the number is not really important, it just shows that hundreds of people have not been motivated enough to change it so far on any lists, and hence have implicitly shown they are in favor of the current format. This point is possibly debatable as maybe people just haven't thought of it before, however some people, as shown above (Zoe and Brion) have and like the current format. If you want to organize a vote for it somewhere other than here (since it affects a lot of people on the English Wikipedia), be my guest, but I doubt very much you will get a majority agreeing to Last Name, First Name as a general rule. Nanobug 15:19, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC)
On a different note, this page is currently nothing more than a list of poets, so I think it should be named that. I'm sure there's more to write about poets than just listing them. Jeronimo 23:44 Jul 25, 2002 (PDT)
- Moved list, replaced with a definition to encourage stub development. --mav
- Looks like the list got alphabetized by last name anyway. Sigh. --Zoe
- It was to begin with. Check the history. :o)
