I’m new to MusicBrainz and very easily could be missing seeing a discussion where this has already been talked to death, but why are artists the only entities that have a sort name? Sure, they’re the only place where the “Last, First” pattern applies, but releases, tracks, and works all have a similar “Name, The” inversion (not to mention whatever other languages do), and I’ve taken to replacing Roman numerals and spelled-out numbers in part or volume suffixes with their standard forms to ensure my programs order them correctly. I know that, given the size of the database, there will always be plenty of incorrectly-formatted sort names if the field is added now, but surely that’s not enough of a reason to not do so?
For those entries you have aliases with their alias sort names.
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Areas and labels used to have sort names, too, but they were intentionally removed:
https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-6602
https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-6603
As @jesus2099 already said, the idea is that aliases, having locales, are better suited for holding sort names; in particular because sort names are not necessarily the same for each language.
You don‘t say whether you apply these changes that you speak of to your local files or to MB. If the latter, please stop.
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Ah, that makes sense. And I wouldn’t dream of making those changes to the actual titles, in MB or my local files – I create new tags in my local metadata to hold them. Just figured it might be helpful to have some examples.