Doesn't seem like anything has been done on this, and I'd like to also request this feature. Is there a way perhaps to have an options screen before the bibliography is actually inserted that would allow you to check a box for "ignore the, a, an", and anything else people may have suggested as biblio options?

Users clearly want Zotero to ignore initial articles (a, an, the) when alphabetizing titles in bibliographies, a long accepted bibliographic practice. Does anyone know if it's actually being worked on? I could find nothing like it in the list of features for the beta version.

Thanks fbennett. That's welcome news. Please keep us posted on the progress.

I would like to add my support to the need for stopwords and appropriate alphabetizing. This should be a very high priority if Zotero intends to be competitive.

related (though not the same:) https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/32226/omitting-initial-the-in-journal-titles-for-chicago/#Item_5

well, there are two actually separate requests here: The OP asks about this in Zotero proper. I'm not sure how interested devs are going to be in this, and while it'd be nice, I don't think it's terribly important.

Doing this in bibliographies, otoh, is crucial and via Frank's involvement here, this is as formal as it normally gets for citeproc. I think there have been several discussions on this, but I don't remember the status. The first question would be whether this can be hardcoded into the citeproc for all styles or whether this needs to be a toogle in CSL. We must have discussed this before--Rintze, Frank, any recollection?

Do any citation styles actually want sorting to be done on the leading articles?

Along with Chicago, MHRA (3rd ed. p. 80) also calls for it.

I'm pretty convinced this is the case for English titles in English citation styles. What we would need to check is:

1. Non-English titles in English citation styles (that should be easy and I could look it up, but I figure you already have the sections of the manuals dug up) (i.e. Die Leiden des Jungen Werther under L or D?)
2. Titles in non-English citation styles in the same language of the style?
3. Titles in non-English citation styles in other languages than the style (including, of course) English.

Hoping for some input from zuphilip and Gracile or clio on German and English practice here.

ugh. That makes sense given the respective core disciplines, but that means if we want to do it properly, we'll need to go the CSL route. I'll still wait for more input on that before starting to work towards a specific proposal.

French practice: definite articles are ignored (le, la, les, l’ in French, the in English, il, la, i in Italian, die, das, der in German, etc.)
E.g.: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modèle:Classement_alphabétique

(But AFNOR Z 44-080, a cataloguing standard though, seems to exclude all articles, unless the article is part of a proper noun.)

I'd suspect that this is an oversight on MLA's part. The treatment should be similar to general sorting behavior that we apply to non-English characters. The English reader of the material should not be expected to understand the ordering of foreign alphabets

well, but this is MLA, which is why I say the disciplinary association matters. This would be what your comparative literature, German literature etc. folks use, so I think it makes perfect sense they'd differ. I don't think that's an accident.
See also Gracile's note on French.

@fbennett, yes that makes sense, I was thinking about this last night.

MLA, Chicago, and SPA also require numerals to be sorted as though they were spelled out

i.e. as if they had been written (ninety-five for 95 => n?) or as if they were not there at all? That's not the case in French: titles beginning with numerals are at the top of the bibliography.

+1 for locales; and this would make possible to adapt the list on a style-by-style basis.

Is the number rule rare enough for us to ignore? (as in: the number of situations this will be relevant is tiny?) That'll be a nightmare on implementation and I have my doubts that's worth it.

Think about localizing that rule: in German, e.g., 82 and 82,000 start with Z while 820 and 8,200 start with A.

In my experience, non-English journals' bibliographies seem to sort titles that begin with numbers at the top. English language journals number-first titles can be found either place depending on the journal and professional specialty. Medicine and engineering at the top, social science and humanities more likely are sorted as though the number were spelled out. This pattern seems independent of the APA, Chicago, or MLA style standards.

For what it is worth, journal publishers don't seem too concerned about this aspect of author name sorting. The noted British sociologist David Ashworth legally changed his name to Perri 6. His specialty is cultural concepts of risk. In bibliographies sorted by author name he is usually at the top but even in the same journal his name is sometimes article bibliographies have him sorted under "S". I think I remember once finding his name sorted at the end.

Personally, I would like numbers always sorted at the top. That way, I'll always know where to find the items. It seems to me that this is one of those things that may need to be hand edited after the bibliography is complete.