Category name incorrectly alphabetized

Question

I requested the creation of the USS George Washington (SSBN-598), United States Navy category as a subcategory of United States Navy Submarines. All the other submarines in the United States Navy Submarines category are listed in alphabetical order by the name of the ship. The George Washington, however, is listed under U instead of G.

Every US Navy ship has USS or USNS as the first part of the ship name. If we alphabetized by USS/USNS, every ship in the category would be listed under U and there would be no other letters represented. This would make the process of finding a given ship very tedious.

Will someone who knows how please change whatever needs to be changed so that the USS George Washington (SSBN-598), United States Navy category appears in the United States Navy Submarines category under the letter G rather than U?

If you could also provide instructions (or a link to such) for how to make such a change, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you.

Answer 1

This is done with a sort key in the parent category name. See:https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Category:USS_George_Washington_(SSBN-598)%2C_United_States_Navy&action=edit

See how the name of the category is there, followed by a pipe character "|" and then the first few letters of the word "George".

Comments

Hi Natalie,

Thanks for sharing the info about the sort key parameter. But I'm curious why it's suggested to use only the first few characters of the vessel name for the sort key parameter - is there a small sort key parameter character limit and/or a significant software performance issue with using longer sort key strings?

It's possible that there may be other vessels added to the same parent category in the future which may have those same first few characters in the vessel name (for example, USS George Washington Carver (SSBN-656), USS George C. Marshall (SSBN-654), or USS George Bancroft (SSBN-643). It appears to me that, if possible, we should enter as sort key parameter the vessel name (without the ship prefix), if we want the entries within the parent category to be sorted appropriately.

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Ok. You still won't need the entire name down to the prefix in order to get a good sort.In your examples I would do |George Wash, |George C. M, and |George Banc

When you work with as many cats a day as I do, you take a few shortcuts.