All The Tropes:How to Alphabetize Things

All works pages and most indexes are supposed to contain lists of tropes in alphabetical order. Standards for alphabetizing may vary; to make things easier to find, we want to keep ours consistent, so please use the rules below even if you're used to alphabetizing things differently somewhere else.

  • Ignore articles at the beginnings of titles. That is, the words "a", "an", and "the". They're incredibly common and removing them doesn't usually change the meaning of the trope, so it's better just to pretend they're not there at all. For example, The Magic Goes Away should be alphabetized under M; A God Am I goes under G.
    • Do this even for foreign-language articles. The vast majority of all tropes with foreign-language names are in either Japanese or French. Japanese doesn't have any articles, so mostly this just means ignoring "le", "la", "les", and "l'" at the beginning of articles with French names. For example, La Résistance goes under R.
    • Be careful, especially with "a", that it's being used as an article in the trope name. For example, A-Team Firing is about The A-Team, not just about "a team", so it should be alphabetized under A.
  • Ignore spaces and punctuation. There are different English-language standards about what to do with spaces; this is the one that best corresponds with the way the wiki's internal database works.
  • Shorter entries alphabetize before longer entries starting with them. Badass comes before Badass Bystander.
  • Treat special characters as though they were the corresponding ordinary character. Mostly this is so accented and non-accented versions of the same name get alphabetized in the same way. For example, Pokémon should be alphabetized as though it were spelled "Pokemon".
  • Numbers and symbols come before letters. For example, 100% Completion should come before Alpha Bitch, since numbers are alphabetized before letters.

When creating pages, you can help the wiki automatically sort things correctly on Category pages and elsewhere by using the DEFAULTSORT markup if your page's name starts with an article or punctuation. For example, if your page is called "The Page Name That Starts With an Article", then you would put the following at the bottom of the page:

{{DEFAULTSORT:Page Name That Starts With an Article, The}}

If your page name starts with a punctuation mark, remove all the punctuation for the DEFAULTSORT.

You can (and should!) use the same DEFAULTSORT on subpages. If you put {{DEFAULTSORT:Page Name That Starts With an Article, The}} on both "The Page Name That Starts With an Article", "The Page Name That Starts With an Article/Trivia", and "The Page Name That Starts With an Article/YMMV", the wiki software is smart enough to sort the Trivia and YMMV subpages in alphabetical order after the main page.

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