Community Suggestion: Separate the concepts of an article name and an article title

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Separate the concepts of an article name and an article title

Feature Upgrade · Articles & templates · Created by DMFW
closed

What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?

  This is a different take on a recently declined feature request:-   "AN OPTION FOR SORTING ALPHABETICALLY THAT SKIPS THE FIRST WORD OF AN ARTICLE'S TITLE"   which I think would solve all the issues some people had without necessarily requiring a lot of complex development work (although I accept it is non-trivial) and whilst being much more flexible for users. My proposal is simply that every article should have a name and a title and that these should be two different fields. When creating new articles, users would be creating them by name. The title might default to the same thing as the name (although that is not necessary) but could be changed separately.   For all display purposes, the title would be what we see at the head of articles and in tree and category views. For all use and reference purposes it would be the name that would apply. Articles would be sorted and refereced by the name and not by the title.  

How does this feature request address the current situation?

  Considering the scenario in the declined suggestion, where there was a desire to skip "the" for searching, this would no longer be an issue. The title could include "the" but the name would simply drop it, making use and search work as desired. Because it would be the responsibilty of the article creator to set the name and title as they like, they would have full control over any sorting issues.   Furthermore, this instantly deals with all issues in foreign languages without WA having to understand what is and isn't a prefix and without introducing any complex substring rules or regular expressions. It just becomes the user's responsibility to set the name and title to get the sorting/mention and display behaviour they desire respectively.  

What are other uses for this feature request?

  Name and titles are subtly different things and although its obviously fine to treat them as the same thing in the vast majority of cases, separating them out (as for example, is already the case with images) allows for cleaner functional isolation going forwards.

The Team's Response

Thanks for the suggestion! This would actually be a significantly complex undertaking for the dev team, as article titles are integrated into pretty much every single interface of the website, with different uses, purposes, and formats. This means that, in order to implement this, we'd need to update almost every single feature to account for the two different titles that articles can have. Therefore, we're closing this for now, but you're free to suggest it again in the future if you think it will gather a much higher level of support.
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Current score

58/300 Votes · +15401 points

Votes Cast

  • +100

    by Alyvins
    on 2024-06-10 21:07

  • +300

    by AvalonArcana
    on 2024-06-10 13:49

  • +300

    by Dreadwish
    on 2024-06-09 19:48

  • +300

    by WitchyWoman128
    on 2024-06-09 17:19

  • +1

    by Gaëlle S.
    on 2024-06-07 13:27

  • +100

    by Bjuzz
    on 2024-06-07 08:50

  • +300

    by NovaTerra
    on 2024-06-07 07:56

  • +100

    by Menatith
    on 2024-06-07 07:38

  • +300

    by JoellaKay
    on 2024-06-06 20:13

  • +300

    by Blue Fairy 74
    on 2024-06-06 16:04

  • +300

    by Frod0_baggins
    on 2024-06-06 15:42

  • +300

    by Mochimanoban
    on 2024-06-06 15:38

  • +300

    by Those2Nerds
    on 2024-06-06 15:32
    Yes yes yes! Having a back-end title and a display title resolves everything! The two can match by default and be optionally changed for times when your article must start with "the" or similar, but shouldn't be sorted under "T".

  • +300

    by Michael Chandra
    on 2024-06-06 14:28
    Yes please! Being able to differentiate between internal and external title would really help with my personal overview of my content.

  • +100

    by Goddess_Of_Luck
    on 2024-06-03 12:24

  • +100

    by Shirmanto B
    on 2024-06-03 05:59

  • +300

    by NiwdeMaster
    on 2024-06-01 18:32

  • +300

    by Kaleidechse
    on 2024-06-01 09:36
    That is a very good idea! It also looks like it should be easy to implement, with just an additional "Display Title" field that defaults to the already existing name.

  • +300

    by Writing Bishop
    on 2024-05-31 21:55

  • +300

    by [email protected]
    on 2024-05-31 18:25

  • +300

    by Typh
    on 2024-05-31 12:51

  • +300

    by Ormus_Erebus
    on 2024-05-30 21:12
    This is a pretty elegant solution to me

  • +300

    by Jupiter Melichios
    on 2024-05-29 22:58
    Seems like a neat solution to a problem the community has been discussing for a while!

  • +300

    by Eaglelord2008
    on 2024-05-29 22:46

  • +300

    by DarthKipsu
    on 2024-05-29 18:09

  • +300

    by bphilippe
    on 2024-05-29 06:18

  • +300

    by A Rambunctious Velociraptor
    on 2024-05-29 04:07
    This would be extremely helpful. I'd use the heck out of it.

  • +300

    by Goose80
    on 2024-05-27 03:46

  • +300

    by MistyShadowsXX
    on 2024-05-26 22:30

  • +300

    by Kittymonster
    on 2024-05-26 20:10

  • +300

    by RegentTerry
    on 2024-05-25 22:16
    You could also call this a "sort as" field. Would be VERY helpful!

  • +300

    by Chrysochus
    on 2024-05-25 06:50

  • +300

    by BattIeBear
    on 2024-05-23 20:41

  • +300

    by CannedStrawberries
    on 2024-05-23 19:53

  • +300

    by grinningsatyr
    on 2024-05-23 03:59

  • +100

    by yatenari
    on 2024-05-22 20:18

  • +300

    by A Cute Orc
    on 2024-05-22 06:55
    Perfect suggestion, move it. This would smoother over a lot of minor but frequently encountered inconveniences.

  • +100

    by A Fierce Mlem
    on 2024-05-22 04:13

  • +300

    by FenixGraey
    on 2024-05-22 02:41
    I would also suggest this for Hyperlinking articles together! Giving an Article a Title should also be separate from the Name used to describe it. Sometimes I want to hyperlink a location in its Short-Form name, instead of its Long-Form title.

  • +300

    by FinalLegacy
    on 2024-05-21 21:21

  • +300

    by Pythix
    on 2024-05-21 14:49

  • +300

    by SparkyTheSec0nd
    on 2024-05-21 13:57

  • +300

    by JetpackMonkey
    on 2024-05-21 09:50

  • +300

    by Ononomad
    on 2024-05-21 07:44

  • +300

    by Blossom Tree Art
    on 2024-05-20 16:15

  • +300

    by kaixabu
    on 2024-05-20 12:46

  • +300

    by spooktacular
    on 2024-05-20 12:20

  • +300

    by anc789sims
    on 2024-05-19 17:16

  • +300

    by Buzzard
    on 2024-05-19 12:57

  • +100

    by Adcheryl
    on 2024-05-18 16:34

  • +300

    by Mahdi Avendesora
    on 2024-05-18 12:27

  • +100

    by A Fluffy Hobbit
    on 2024-05-18 10:24

  • +100

    by DramaticDragons
    on 2024-05-18 03:06

  • +300

    by Roobix Qube
    on 2024-05-18 00:25

  • +300

    by Amancham
    on 2024-05-17 22:05
    Uh, I like this idea. I'm wondering if this might also help with bilingual worlds. using "title-en" and "title-es" or whatever other language for easy linking whilte the displayed title could be in the respective language. (might be a bit harder to sort, but I do like the options this would open up)

  • +300

    by WeStanNikolai
    on 2024-05-17 18:49
    This is a great idea - It reminds me of how in family trees the characters name is drawn from the title unless the name fields are filled in - maybe this could work similarly?

  • +300

    by A Beloved Hobbit
    on 2024-05-17 14:50

  • +300

    by ss2020
    on 2024-05-17 14:36
    This is a great idea. I have so many titles that look bad si I can keep them from being confused during searches and lookups.

  • +300

    by DMFW
    on 2024-05-17 13:36
Hello! <3 I hope you are having a nice day!

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