WorldconVotingSystems/nomnom

Automatically move articles to the beginnings of titles?

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#222 opened on Feb 12, 2025

 (4 comments) (0 reactions) (0 assignees)Python (13 forks)auto 404
administrator-featuredeferredenhancementhelp wantednice-to-have

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Description

Could NomNom detect the case where a title ends with “, The” or “, A” or “, An” and automatically move the article to the start of the title?

I wouldn’t have expected that nominators would enter titles as “Lord of the Rings, The”, but in an article in Uncanny, Nicholas wrote: “And, folks, if you think you are being helpful by inputting “Lord of the Rings, The” and “Hobbit, The,” you’re really not.”

But in the Lady Business recommendations spreadsheet (https://bit.ly/hugoaward2025), it simplifies sorting if they can put the articles at the ends of titles. So in the past, they’ve put articles at the ends. But it sounds like some people may be copying and pasting titles from the Lady Business spreadsheet into the nomination form, so Lady Business has switched to articles-at-starts even though that makes their sheets less usable.

So if NomNom could automatically move those articles to the start, then Lady Business could go back to articles-at-ends, and Hugo administrators wouldn’t have to deal with the misplaced articles.

(I know there are possible issues—what about articles in non-English languages? What if a story really is titled “End of the World, The”? But I strongly suspect that moving articles to the starts of titles would be the right thing to do for well over 99% of cases where “, The” or “, A” or “, An” appear at the ends of titles.)

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