Why are all the listed articles in Engineering Workgroup not alphabetized?

[Milton Beychok]

When I go to the Engineering Workgroup to view all of the articles in that workgroup, they are all alphabetized except for a small group of articles at the end of the listing (i.e., after those articles beginning with a Z).

They are all quite new articles (just a few days old) and it is as if they are waiting for someone to alphabetize them. Is there any way for an editor to "force" their alphabetization?

Milton Beychok

[Robert_W_King]

Could just be slow server cache update.

[Zachary Pruckowski]

Could just be slow server cache update.

Not even a thousand jobs on the queue.  Probably not there.  Certainly not a multi-day backup (that should clear in an hour or two).

Do they all have subpages?  Did the user who made them set the 'abc' on the Metadata template?

If it is a server cache issue, any edit to the page (even a single space inserted somewhere) would clear it up.

[Milton Beychok]

Zachary:

Yes, they have the abc on the Metadata page set. Yes, they have subpages.
 
The Edit page of the Engineering Workgroup article list simply has a template {{WG_articles|Field=Engineering}}. Adding blank spaces and blank lines did not correct the problem.

Is there anyplace else to report this problem? I am pretty much of a newcomer.

Milton Beychok

[Hayford Peirce]

It's the problem we've discussed before, where I fixed it (kludged it) by making a minor change in the text of the article, saving it, then reverting the change.  This clears the cache, or some such, and (if the metadata is correctly entered) the article is listed correctly in the list.

[Jitse Niesen]

When I go to the Engineering Workgroup to view all of the articles in that workgroup, they are all alphabetized except for a small group of articles at the end of the listing (i.e., after those articles beginning with a Z).

They are all quite new articles (just a few days old) and it is as if they are waiting for someone to alphabetize them. Is there any way for an editor to "force" their alphabetization?

When I checked, there were four articles unalphabetized in a group after the Z. They all had the abc field set to either   or   + name of article. This will not work; you have to set it to the name of the article, as you want it to appear in the list (so remove the   bit). I fixed them and all seems to be fine now; see for instance this edit to learn what I did.

[Milton Beychok]

Jitse:

Thanks a million!!

Now, my only question is why is the   included in the metadata form just for the "abc"? It isn't included on any of the other items. Why not delete the   completely to avoid confusing other newcomers like me?

[Robert_W_King]

As I recall there was some error with leaving it blank.

[Joe Quick]

The reason such articles show up in a separate group after "Z" is that they are being alphabetized as a space ("&nbsp" is a no linebreak space.)  I think Robert is right about the reason the &nbsp is there to begin with.  As far as I know, the template is supposed to alphabetize according to the pagename if the abc field isn't filled in or is filled with a space.  But it doesn't.  So for now, we'll need to replace the &nbsp with the articles' titles. 

Chris Day is the person to ask if you want more details or insight.

[Bryan Pilati]

Is anything going on in the Engineering work group now?