I read much technical details on this thread on how collation and sorting is extremely complex. I hereby admit, that I don't understand all of the database dependencies and collation nifles or whatever else may be the limiting factors that play a role here. Perhaps I shouldn't participate in a tech discussion that I don't fully understand, but take me for a wiki user who spends many hour to add defaultsort statements to articles and doesn't understand why the software cannot do it by itself. Perhaps you can shed some more light on it for a dummie like me.
Here is, what I in my simple mind think, how it would be solvable (I'm sure my thoughts are too simple, but I want to understand, why and in what way they are too simple) . As an example I take the German language: Take the pagename and make it uppercase (could be lowercase too, but uppercase seems better as the first letter will show up in the category). str_replace "Ä" with "A", "Ö" with "O", "Ü" with "U" and "ß" with "SS". Also str_replace other Latin characters with diacritics with their counterpart without diacritic. And that's our sortkey. This very simple procedure should reduce the number of necessary defaultsorts (except for articles about persons) by about 90% in the German wikipedia. Implement these steps directly in the software and it should fix the sorting of categories. I read much about uniqueness in the thread, but defaultsort isn't unique either. Of course it only works for languages where the unicode byte order of the basic script correspondends with the sorting order. But a solution helping 80% of the languages in 80% of all cases (and with no disadvantages for the other 20%) is better than a solution that helps 100% of all languages in 100% of all cases, but that does not exist yet, doesn't it? Marcus Buck User:Slomox _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
