Ask The Tropers

I think you have the right idea regarding how to do the wikiword. I don't think it's even possible to start a page name with a symbol like μ. I'm assuming it's pronounced "mu"? Worst case I can see going one route and using Mike Paradinas or the other as a redirect.

I don't see a reason it can't be Music.Mu Ziq custom-titled to μ-Ziq. It's not all that different from, say, Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey rendering 2001: A Space Odyssey. Any problems with Unicode compatibility should be avoided because the special character is only in the custom title, not in the page code, as I understand it. But someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Edit: Ninja'd, and I agree with the above. It's not even possible to start a title with numbers (though it can contain them), let alone special characters, hence my 2001 example.

I agree with the suggestion to start the page as Music.Mu Ziq and request a custom title.

Due to people not always being familiar with non-English letters, I suggest making Music.U Ziq into a redirect because "it looks like a u".

^ That's a good idea.

^^And even people who recognize it as the Greek letter mu may type it as "u" if they're using plain ASCII. This is actually a convention in electronics, where e.g. a capacitance of 10 μF (microfarads) is often written as "10 uF".

At the very least, don't put an hyphen in the title (before custom titling, that is). Those are a pain when inside the URL and were phased out years ago.

Seconding making Music.U Ziq a redirect and not putting a hyphen in the non-custom title.

I just created the page (and the redirect); when I alphabetize it in indices, would it go before or after numbers? (assuming it goes with the rest of the special/non-Latin letter characters and not under M)

Excellent question. How to Alphabetize Things makes no mention of non-Latin alphabets; I’m not sure it’s ever come up before.

My suspicion is that non-Latin characters go at the end, but perhaps we could argue that since μ is the Greek equivalent of m, it should go under M.

There's also the argument to put it under "U" because of what it looks like. This could be tricky, I think whatever the case some commented notes in the other letters might be needed.

Personally, I'd go for "M".

Definitely not U; that just makes us guilty of The Backwards Я. If articles that start with Greek letters were more common I'd argue against mixing them in with Latin, and would perhaps suggest putting them between the numbers and the Latin letters. Since, as I mentioned, this is a very isolated case and I don't see it cropping up too much, alphabetizing it as if it were spelled "muziq" is probably fine.

Okay, I've just tried conducting multiple Google searches and haven't come up with anything consistent, so perhaps there's no "official" stylistic guideline for alphabetising non-Latin characters, just an avalanche of unofficial ones. So for lack of anything definitive, I'd follow HeraldAlberich's suggestion of alphabetising it as if it were spelled "muziq".

Although How to Alphabetize Things only mention numbers going before characters, the general rule is to put special characters even before numbers. You'll notice that title such as +Anima or ×××HOLiC go on top of the alphabetical list on indexes such as Manga.