Talk:Jessee
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Chronological vs. alphabetical order
[edit]Several discussions at WP:ANTHROPONYMY have not produced any strong consensus on enforcing either alphabetical or birth-year order of entries on name pages:
- Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Anthroponymy/Archive_4#Regarding_the_order_of_names_on_name_pages
- Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Anthroponymy/Standards#Proposal:_Sorting_by_birth_year,_death_year_and_alphabetically_with_a_sortable_table
- Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Anthroponymy/Archive_6#Format_for_lists_of_people
- Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Anthroponymy/Archive_8#Strange_list_format
MOS:DABORDER does not mandate either alphabetical or chronological order: Within each section, entries should be ordered to best assist the reader in finding their intended article. Entries are typically ordered first by similarity to the ambiguous title, then alphabetically or chronologically as appropriate
. (Yes, WP:SETNOTDAB, but there are generally similarities between how the two types of pages are structured.) Similarly, MOS:LISTORG says The most basic form of organization is alphabetical or numerical (such as List of Star Wars starfighters), though if items have specific dates a chronological format is sometimes preferable
.
There are arguments in favour of both orders. Alphabetical order may be more convenient for editors, for example. However, it's not very useful for readers of a surname page: if they're on a surname page and trying to find a specific individual, pretty clearly they don't know that person's given name (otherwise they'd just go to the person's article directly), but they probably have a rough idea of the person's age or the era in which they lived. Given that there's no strong consensus either way, IMO the best thing to do for the moment is not to change the order around when you come across a page that's already been sorted one way. Regards 61.239.39.90 (talk) 00:15, 4 June 2021 (UTC)