Talk:Melchior Wańkowicz

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A fact from Melchior Wańkowicz appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 13 April 2008.
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[edit] Deliberate missorting

Piotrus, why do you persist in deliberately missorting articles such as this one, by including an ń in the sort key? You know better. Not only have I taken you to task for this before, but so have others such as Firsfron of Ronchester on your talk page here on 5 Dec 2007 UTC.

Since you only created this article nearly four months later, on 28 Mar 2008 UTC, the only explanation I can come up with is that your missorting was a deliberate act; any other explanations would be welcome.

What's most baffling is this: Why in the world would you want to go to the trouble of creating some articles, and working to improve others, only to hide them away so that someone looking for them might not find them? Doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Mistakes by editors who don't know how sorting should work, or simply don't know how the rudimentary Wikipedia software handles it, I can understand. But you are not in that category—you already know this results in them being improperly sorted, yet you do it anyway. Gene Nygaard (talk) 21:17, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I see Benea has fixed it for you. Gene Nygaard (talk) 12:23, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
As I've noted before, the fact that wikimedia category sorting has trouble with diacritics, and thus incorrectly puts Wańkowicz before (for example) Waszkowicz (as ń =/= n) is a bug that should be fixed, just like using diacritics in names was enabled. Once this bug is fixed, you will have to revert all of your work. What you are doing currently is replacing one error with another - thus I prefer to create the articles with the error that will cease to be one after bug fixing.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 12:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
No, your improper individual sort keys incorrectly put Wankowicz after (not before as it should be and as you misspoke above) Waszkowicz. Without them, this article would have sorted between Me and Mf. And you were fully aware that your sort key would make it sort incorrectly; that it would make Melchior Wańkowicz come after Wade Ward, Sidney William Ware, Julia Warhola, Reginald Alexander John Warneford, Jack Warner, Paul Wartelle. Alan Tower Waterman, Thomas E. Watson (USMC), William Watson, Baron Watson, and Robert Watson-Watt in a category listing, not before them.
Technically, it most certainly is not a "bug". The software may be crude and rudimentary, but it does exactly what it was intended to do, and does it well enough so that we can accomplish what we need to do to get things sorted properly in our categories.
There have, of course, been many requests for additional features in this software. These requests are made through the same "bug reports" as are used for actual bugs at the off-Wikipedia Bugzilla site, and consequently sometimes characterized as bugs by those making the requests. The first such requests likely came within days of the first use of categories on Wikipedia; there were many more after we switched to Unicode, of course.
Note also that while we need to use English-language sorting rules on the English language Wikipedia, in the Polish-language rules appropriate for Polish Wikipedia, Melchior Wańkowicz should also come before Wade Ward, Sidney William Ware, Julia Warhola, Reginald Alexander John Warneford, Jack Warner, Paul Wartelle. Alan Tower Waterman, Thomas E. Watson (USMC), William Watson, Baron Watson, and Robert Watson-Watt in the Polish-language sorting rules which woud be appropriate in the Polish Wikipedia. Your improper sort keys would have resulted sorting every bit as much improper on Polish Wikipedia as it was here on English Wikipedia. But in the Polish language sorting, he might (do you know the rules for sure?) come after Lewis W. Wannamaker, whereas he should clearly be before him in English-language sorting rules. That this isn't really a "bug" is likely one reason for inaction; the need to make hundreds of different software changes to work properly in hundreds of different languages used in various Wikipedias, and the difficulty of determining how each of those languages would handle each of the thousands of different characters (does Ő sort with O or does it sort with Ö in German? How about in Swedish? In Turkish? And that's on the simple end of the range) is likely one of the factors holding up any action on those longstanding requests.
There is no error in individually adding proper sort keys that will work. Those sort keys will still work if at some future time the requests for additional features are acted upon. We won't have to rush around changing anything in existing articles, other than to continue to fix the ones to which improper sort keys have been added, inadvertently by most editors who do so, but deliberately and intentionally by a few such as Piotrus. But the addition of those additional features isn't likely to happen in my lifetime; such requests have already been around for years without being acted upon.
In the meantime, we need to fix the articles so that they sort properly now. You need to follow the rules expressed in many places in our guidelines, in the "Help" namespace, in some MoS pages, in various template documentation, and elsewhere. Gene Nygaard (talk) 15:32, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

As a native English speaker, I would expect Wańkowicz to be sorted before Wannamaker. For some time now the Manual of Style has advised removing accents from letters. Similarly, Bönen should be sorted as "Bonen", as it otherwise would be categorized after Brüggen. I would also expect Hövelhof to be sorted simply as "Hovelhof", not as "Hoevelhof" (which would sort it before Hopsten). Olessi (talk) 21:52, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

The last one is the only one that is really debatable, but as far as I know Wikipedia:Categorization and its subpages have recommended "o" for some time. It is logical for us to do it that way, when you consider that otherwise it might depending on knowing the language from which the ö came. The German ö is often transliterated as "oe"; rarely is that done for the Swedish ö, for example. The simplest and most likely to succeed on Wikipedia is to always sort it as "o". Similarly, in Norwegian sorting, I'm not surprised to see someone with my last name sorted after Nygren, but it shoud be before Nygren in English, and so should Nygård as well. In cases of considerable usage of the "oe" spelling but with an "ö" in the articles name (similarly for various others like it), you can categorize a redirect as well to increase chances that someone looking for it will find it, but most of the time that won't be worth the trouble. Gene Nygaard (talk) 01:16, 11 April 2008 (UTC)