Forum:Ordering Sections of Articles

We recently had the beginnings of a discussion on the format to be observed for ordering sections of articles whose subjects appear in many stories. Three contenders for the format emerged: alphabetical organization by series (with various X-Time sections usually grouped as a subsection of "Article X in the Crosstime Series"); descending order of resemblance to the subject in OTL, a format piloted in Joseph Stalin and thoroughly discussed on his talk page; and in descending order of substantive content/relevance to the stories each section writes about.

Using the example of Babe Ruth, under the first format he'd have "Batboy," BtB, Worldwar, HTGB, and DSA, which is the order at time of this writing. Under the second format he'd have "Batboy," BtB, DSA, HTGB, and Worldwar. Under the third he'd have HTGB (a whole life story available), "Batboy" (he shows up for a second or two) and we'd then have to come up with a tiebreaker among BtB, DSA, and Worldwar ("Oh, yes," said a character, "Babe Ruth existed;" though as TR points out, in DSA George Herman may not have been Babe Ruth at all. I'd suggest the astronomical improbability of that coincidence makes it more likely he simply didn't use his full name, as Henry Louis Gehrig dropped Henry and just went by Lou, but that's neither here nor there.) I'd suggest alphabetical order as the tiebreaker.

Alphabetical order is currently in use for most of our non-character articles, though it's imperfectly enforced; see for instance Germany. Descending order of resemblance to OTL is currently in use for most of our articles on historical figures, which seems to be defined mostly as PODs arranged from late to early. (For instance, Adolf Hitler currently precedes Adolf Hitler, though I'd humbly submit that starting the war in Czechoslovakia rather than Poland is less dramatic a difference than starting the war then calling it off on account of extraterrestrial invasion. However, it TWTPE does have the earlier POD.)  If this is what we're going with, we should be clear that date of POD is the definition, not the more subjective "This doesn't remind me of OTL as much as the other story."

Descending order of relevance to a story is not in use but I thought it would be worthwhile to bring into this discussion. It's most user-friendly to a hypothetical user who's looking for story specific information. Using Babe Ruth again, I dare suggest that article will be searched by people who are interested in HTGB far, far more often than by people who read Earl Warren's one-liner to Yeager and say "Oh boy! He said Babe Ruth!  I wonder how the geeks on Turtlewiki address that." I think perhaps George Herman would be the second-most frequent reason to look up Ruth, yet at present both sections follow a long string of one-sentence sections about how characters made irrelevant offhand references to him.

Whatever we decide (alphabetical, POD, subjective measure of similarity to OTL, descending order of relevance, or another, as-yet unproposed standad) we ought to make it a rule for all articles; one standard for characters and another for non-characters bespeaks an arbitrary distinction without a difference, and it could confuse or annoy users used to sections being arranged in a certain way. In practice I realize this means we'll impose this rule on new articles and leave the many hundreds of existing articles as they are until we happen to have some independent reason to edit each of them on an ad hoc basis, and then only assuming we remember. I've been around here long enough to know that such major, fundamental sea changes in formatting policy tend to get pushed off ad infinitum. Turtle Fan 06:31, June 29, 2010 (UTC)