Thoughts off the top of my head:
1. I’m generally in favour of changes that makes our guidelines less
ambiguous.
2. I’m of the opinion that apostrophes used with personal names should
be removed in sort names. Example: “John Smith’s Awesome Orchestra”
would ideally become (IMHO): “Smith, John, Awesome Orchestra”
3. Since the intent is to provide lexicographical collation, I wonder
if there should be any punctuation should be retained in sort names at
all.
4. If we do retain punctuation in sort names, I would suggest that we
do explicitly establish punctuation character equivalency (' == ’) or
limit the characters that should be used.
Paul
-----Original Message-----
*From*: Bogdan Butnaru <bogd...@gmail.com
<mailto:bogdan%20butnaru%20%3cbogd...@gmail.com%3e>>
*Date*: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:52:55 +0100
Hello everyone!
I don’t recall seeing this subject mentioned, but I wasn’t always
along for the whole discussion on RFV2-294.
I’ve been looking through Sortname Style and I don’t notice any
specific mention of punctuation; there’s only the general rule about
“stylized names”. So as far as I can tell, the current Miscellaneous
Guideline applies to sortnames, in the sense that correct punctuation
is preferred to ASCII but not mandatory.
While that is in itself an acceptable policy, it does potentially
break the implied intent of a sortname. Imagine the scenario of these
four bands existing (each name starting after the colon):
1: X’s a
2: X’s aa
3: X’s b
4: X’s bb
As I understand it, Sortname Style is intended to lead to these four
names being sorted as above (1-2-3-4). However, if for some reason 1
and 3 use one kind of apostrophe and 2 and 4 use a different kind, a
sorting algorithm that doesn’t collate the two apostrophes as
identical can sort them as 1-3-2-4 or 2-4-1-3. Similar things can
happen with the other punctuation marks, but I imagine they’re less
common in names (as opposed to titles); even if they do happen, it’s
less likely that they happen several times in the same position.
So, does anyone else think we need to discuss this?
(Even if we decide that we don’t care and we just leave the option to
the editors, we should probably mention that explicitly in the
Sortname Style page; I had to read it several times to decide that
both ASCII and “correct” punctuation is allowed, and I’m still not
100% sure.
Also note that even if the MusicBrainz server uses a collation that
treats the various apostrophes as identical, other systems like music
players might not.)
-- Bogdan Butnaru
If anybody's interested, there was an apostrophe/sort-name thread
recently on the forums as well.
http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=2520
I agree with pbryan. Possesive apostrophe-s messes up what I'd consider
logical collation.
Alex / caller#6
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