Talk:U.S. foreign policy/Timelines

Title

The titling of history articles has to have the key words on the left. The Key words are Diplomacy and U.S. We can expect to have articles like:

• Diplomacy, China, Timeline
• Diplomacy, Britain, Timeline, etc Richard Jensen 15:15, 14 April 2007 (CDT)

I must confess I still don't understand what this buys us. The abc= field in the metadata ensures that in automatically alphabetized lists, it is alphabetized in the order that field specifies (so that, e.g. 'Michael Faraday' is ordered as if it had been titled 'Faraday, Michael'. So where exactly is it that it shows up in non-manually-ordered lists where it's not alphabetized in that way? J. Noel Chiappa 07:12, 25 May 2008 (CDT)

It shows up in the proper place in "See also" links. Richard Jensen 12:27, 25 May 2008 (CDT)

See Also link lists are manually ordered, no? So you could just stick "Battle of Guadalcanal" in under G, no? And we could define a template "ShowABC", which took an argument of the article name, and created a piped link with the ABC version as what shows up, to alert less-alert authors that in fact it was in the right place in the list... (In fact, that's such a good idea I think I'll suggest it anyway, for things like Michael Faraday on See Also pages...) J. Noel Chiappa 15:34, 27 May 2008 (CDT)

On a closely related issue I'm not sure how the CZ search engine handles its searches--the articles I want do not show up at the top. Solution is more "see also" links. At a deeper level indexing is about how we think about an issue, how we decide what is the most important component of a title. Automatic systems don't think. Richard Jensen 16:07, 27 May 2008 (CDT)

Don't get me started on MediaWiki search - it's horrible!

Good point about the indexing, and how we think about things. I'll try and think of even more ways to use the abc= field of the metadata, which is there precisely to allow humans to indicate what is "the most important component of the title" (I love that phrase). J. Noel Chiappa 18:42, 27 May 2008 (CDT)

This belongs on a subpage about U.S. diplomacy. --Larry Sanger 21:56, 24 May 2008 (CDT)

good point. I've started U.S. Foreign Policy where it can be a subpage. Richard Jensen 22:46, 24 May 2008 (CDT)

What page would it go on? U.S. foreign policy/Timelines or would there be more than one for such an article? If so, then U.S. foreign policy/Timelines/Diplomacy should be the home.

What will this do to the sorting issue discussed above though? Will it become a problem, and if so, we probably need to figure out a solution sooner than later. Noel discussed using the abc field but diplomacy would not be a term in the abc field for such an article. Do we need a seperate sorting field that can be added manually, possibly in this case, using the format of {{Subpages|Diplomacy, U.S., Timeline}} at the top of the timeline, rather than just the regular {{subpages}} template. Using such an option would allow every subpage to have unique sorting terms unrelated to the article name (if needed). Chris Day 01:10, 28 May 2008 (CDT)