Change guideline on sort names for artists with artist name embedded in group name [STYLE-561]

[enjoymoreradio]

Well, my project for the next few months is to go through and change these, but fixing that behavior in the guess sort name function would be great.

[Beckfield]

@reosarevok

• The Great Orchestra and John Doe has sort name “Doe, John, The Great Orchestra and”
• “The Sensational Alex Harvey Band” has sort name “Harvey, Alex, The Sensational, Band”

Both of those look stupid to me, but should they just have “, The” at the end?

I was just about to post something about the Alex Harvey example in the Sort Name guideline, but I found this thread first.

I agree, those do look stupid, and I think they should be:

• Great Orchestra and John Doe, The
• Sensational Alex Harvey Band, The

The whole point of ignoring leading articles when alphabetizing is to avoid the gluts in the alphabetical order at "A " and "The ", etc. When the article or the person’s name are not the beginning of the title, neither rule should apply. None of the (English) style guides that I’m aware of call for that.

I would change Guideline 2 to read:

2. Group artist names beginning with an article (a, an, the, etc.) have the article moved to the end of their sort name.
   a. Where a group artist’s name begins with a person’s name, the artist’s sort name should be the sort name for that person, followed by the remainder of the group artist’s name.

[ulugabi]

Agree that would be better to stick to something simple rather than complex rules for something which is just “Stort name” at the end.
But need to have Guidelines and Guess cases function updated to reflect it.
Do we know why it as chosen initially to have 2.a?

[reosarevok]

@ulugabi

Do we know why it as chosen initially to have 2.a?

So that “Miles Davis Quintet” for example would sort together with “Miles Davis”

[ulugabi]

This case would still work with the upper suggestion (and indeed useful).

But do people really look for John doe when searching for The Great Orchestra and John Doe ?
Similar with all the “His” inside band names, do we need a “McIntyre, Hal and Orchestra, His” or “McIntyre, Hal and His Orchestra” is enough? (and for this case the Guess case isn’t always working)

[highstrung]

The Great Orchestra and John Doe is a contrived example (disappointing to me, as when I first saw that I thought it was John Doe of X). I can’t think of any comparable real world examples.

For the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, though, I do think it should sort next to Alex Harvey as well as Alex Harvey and His Soul Band, as it does under the current guideline.