Talk:List of people by name: Sha

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The following entry, added early this year is not acceptable here as it stood:

*[[Mintimer Shaeymiev|Şäymiev, Mintimer]] (born 1937), [[Tatarstan]] first president

Note that the applicable article is entitled

Mintimer Shaeymiev

while the editor substituted a Unicode (?) character, number 350, namely "Ş" for "Sh" and a more routine West European character, namely "ä" for "ae". The position of the entry indicates the editor intends

  • the ae substitute to be treated for alphabetizing purposes like an "a" (which is our stated method of handling it (or an indistinguishable character) in German-derived names), and
  • the Sh substitute like the combination "Sh", for which there is no comparably clear precedent.

The closest thing to a precedent is stated in the same section just cited: the letters ð and þ (edh, also spelled eth, and thorn respectively, each appearing in modern Icelandic and/or in old English) are treated as unique special cases, each alphabetized like the two-character combination "th". Without being thorough or quantitative in either case, it is clear that edh and thorn display properly on seemingly standard terminals on which the Sh subsitute appears as a square box, like other unknown character encodings. Thus besides the fact that the Sh substitute is not part of the edh/thorn practice, it's clear that it's not a remotely reasonable candidate for an extension of it. There are places within WP where the "350" character may be workable, but such places include neither

  • an article title nor
  • the version of the name intended to be displayed as the basis for its placement in an alphabetical list.

That is because in both of these places character strings are not simply read (or at least given the mental equivalent of mumbling, in cases of employing unfamiliar orthography like "Cwm" for example, since pronunciation is not mandatory) but each character also has to be unambiguously identifiable (without recourse to reading the markup), and those characters have to be part of clear-cut rules: in the case of titles, the server's algorithm for mapping of title strings to pages; in the case of entries in alpha lists, rules our users can carry out in searching for or placing items in alpha lists.

I have

  • added a second entry positioned according to the title spelling,
  • replace the one i found with closely related one at the same location.

The new entry is one linked, uncontroversially, according to the bio article in question:

The replacement entry, staying within the principles stated above, hopefully preserves the information in the one it replaces:

Of course further specialized information may permit us to do even better.
--Jerzy(t) 06:05, 2004 Sep 13 (UTC)

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