Plate numbers

[pierre.chepelov]

I've just seen this, on a record by the NLA:

Publication date approximated from publisher's imprint (Berlin, Breslau, Stettin) and pl. no. Cf. IMSLP/­Petrucci Music Library.
Pl. no.: B. & B. 1173.

Is there any way to *automatically* sort scores by plate numbers? There are tables on publisher pages, but they are almost impossible to maintain.
Maybe we could have some template, like {{Plate|B. & B. 1173}} or {{Plate|B. & B.|1173}}, that at first a bot could quite easily* implement into the current pages, and that could be attached to publisher pages (knowing that multiple plate styles can refer to the same publisher), in a way similar (though different) to the way the Arr, Lib, etc. templates are linked to a person?
* I mean, a bot can deal with everything beginning with "Plate ", or "Plates ", and tag the rest as "no plate #, or special cases to be reviewed"...

[KGill]

I think this is technically within the realm of possibility, and probably the easiest way to do it would be to use this template for every publisher information field: http://imslp.org/wiki/Template:P We could then add some code to it to apply a sorting mechanism, perhaps. Not quite sure how, but at least the number would be formally entered and could be used somehow...
The problem is, of course, that it would be quite a project to implement this across the board. I don't think a bot could help in this case since there are so many discrepancies between different pages and the format is a little complex anyway.