Alphabetical sort order does not seem to work for Knowledge Search in the Knowledge Portal - Support and Troubleshooting

Alphabetical sort order does not seem to work for Knowledge Search in the Knowledge Portal Description While viewing Knowledge Bases under the URI: sp?id=kb_search&spa=1, it seems that the alphabetic sorting (ascending, from a-z) is not honored.

Knowledge articles that start with a letter that appears later in the alphabet shows up above their predecessors. (e.g. Knowledge article starting with the letter 'C' show up before one that starts with 'A')

Cause This issue may arise due to presence of leading whitespaces/ special character in the Short Description. This causes certain articles to be ordered in the front as the Short Description field is used for sorting alphabetically.

Resolution Check if there is leading whitespace in the Title (short description) of the KB article that is showing up on top of others incorrectly.

In order to check this,

1 Drill down to the KB from the list to copy its number

2. As an admin, go to the KB under the ITIL native view through Knowledge> Articles > All from the Application Navigator

3. Open the KB (by searching by the number copied on step 1) and check the Short Description field.

4. Remove the leading white-space/ Special character