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What an ungodly list. How many hundreds of names are there? Hence, by definition, it has flaws. Now, excellently, the list is alphabetic within each section. But its size makes it unmanageable; visually tedious in the extreme to go through; and, most importantly, only of limited use—e.g., for someone who wants to look up one or more individual names. But for a historian doing research, it's useless. I want to know how many alumni there were, by decade, say, in the 19th century and before. But you withhold that information. I mean, does the Wikipedia article listing the governors of Massachusetts simply slam all their names at the reader, undifferentiated, in mere alphabetical order?
Now, this'll take some software footwork, but Wikipedia has the capability. You need to do what the Mass. governors article does: convert this one-dimensional Mardi Gras parade of text to a table, allowing the reader to sort it by year. Once you've done that, it'll be a snap to add sort capability by any other criteria you might devise. Jimlue (talk) 22:45, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
