What is meta? ×
Meta Stack Exchange is where users like you discuss bugs, features, and support issues that affect the software powering all 142 Stack Exchange communities.

On the Stack Exchange list of all sites, sites whose names start with "The" are sorted accordingly. It is common practice to ignore "the" and other similar words when sorting alphabetically.

enter image description here

I suggest ignoring "the" when sorting the list.

share|improve this question
1  
I agree with you, but it is common practice to do it either way. My vote is to ignore The when sorting in this case. –  George W Bush Mar 27 '13 at 18:16

1 Answer 1

I disagree with everyone who had voted so far (26 upvotes to 0 down). I think "The" stands as part of the title in most cases here (not elsewhere/everywhere in life).

The "the" in your examples is used correctly so one can find them logically.
ie you wouldn't have "The Theoretical Computer Science", where as "The Great Outdoors" is logical.

I see your point and argument, but don't fully disagree.

The main key to success with any naming convention is very simply consistency.
If it's always the same then people become familiar with the structure. In fact, even if it's little weird and wacky and not particularly logical, as long as it's consistent throughout people can see the pattern used and work with it.

Also, you really have to consider that if your proposal is implemented it would actually counter your exact intentions, as people are very much accustomed to the way it is now, so the entire list being moved around would cause great issues with finding things.

share|improve this answer
2  
The "consistency" you speak of would be to ignore "the" like every other website on the Internet. When I search for things, I never, ever go to T for titles that start with "the" - I wouldn't expect to find it there. –  animuson Oct 20 '13 at 1:32
    
That's not consistency, that's a method. It might be "consistent with other websites" but Stack can't marry with all other websites. And are you really stating all websites do this? Besides, who cares what other websites do? Other websites allow forum like chat. So in your logic Stack should be consistent with those too? The only rules for consistency is that however you do something you do it the same throughout. Even if you had "The" at the start of everything. Here, "the" is used "consistently" within the search results. –  James Oct 20 '13 at 1:46
    
As in, I have never encountered a site before that sorted including that article. The problem is that users across the web are used to that method, and would expect that same method be utilized wherever they look for something. Heck, even my phone ignores "the" in music titles. I'm not sure what you mean by search. Most search engines would completely drop "the" because it's never a useful search term, unless you're looking for information about the word itself. –  animuson Oct 20 '13 at 2:08
    
iTunes ignores "A" and "The" at the beginning when sorting songs, artists, anything. –  Cole Johnson Oct 20 '13 at 2:49
    
Search engines sort based back links (etc) not names. If iTunes negates "A" and "The" then that's stupid. What do I get if I search for the band "The The"? It'll be at "The" anyway due to the second "The". What about the song title "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me", I have to manually mentally drop the "The" even though it's the actual song title? That song title is still a sentence and so "The" can be defined still as a "definite article", however the song title is also a name where each word is specifically part of that name, and so "The" is not explicatively a "definite article". –  James Oct 20 '13 at 12:48
    
Clearly more people think you're wrong. –  Cole Johnson Oct 22 '13 at 2:07
    
@ColeJohnson "Clearly more people think you're wrong". Clearly. That must mean I'm wrong, and you 5 people are the majority vote representing the entire 2.5 million Stack OVerflow user base... This was more about personal opinion/preferences, and the people who have downvoted simply "don't like" it the way it is. –  James Oct 22 '13 at 7:40

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/168087/ignore-the-when-sorting-sites-alphabetically
meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-18
69658
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:LL7T3CEPW25QK2B66XNYUOW2ZJIAGQRL
<urn:uuid:30bf1841-7d60-4aed-ae23-262f08e690b7>
2015-04-27T15:40:02Z
104.16.12.13
sha1:KB5TKFRKC3WYUMFHQ7CF3JI3HZ7X6DOL
<urn:uuid:e17fa2e0-f3e5-44a2-af86-a3bd861042ae>
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/168087/ignore-the-when-sorting-sites-alphabetically
length
response
<urn:uuid:aa64842a-596d-4afb-a5ca-7ac25e5412cf>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-235-10-82.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-18
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf