On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Marcus Buck <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
This would absolutely be possible as a "mostly works" solution for category sorting. It would mostly just need to have the appropriate code written. The only serious problem with it is that if the rules for automatic default sorting changed, a script of some sort would probably have to reparse all pages in some cases to figure out the original sort key provided, which would be kind of expensive. Of course, this solution is actually woefully incomplete even for German. It only affects category pages, not the zillion other places where pages are sorted by names (Special:AllPages, etc.). But it would be a reasonable step forward if anyone wanted to do the coding required. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
