Help talk:Category

Defaultsort

Could someone expand the section explaining defaultsort? I do not understand what this does or when one should use it. Blue Rasberry 22:06, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, there have been lots of edits like this or this one. To me they just seem some useless clutter of the pages' source code, but I've hesitated to remove them, because the massiveness of such edits suggests some reason for them. What is this reason? — Pt _(T) 13:26, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

In addition, this edit is just weird. Why consider an uppercase abbreviation as lowercase in sorting? Wouldn't it be a much cleaner solution to let the users switch between case sensitive and case insensitive sorting orders on category pages? PS. The Astronomy stubs page has GRB 100621A and GRO J0422+32 totally out of order, and it will have them as such as long as there is at least one "GR*" page without that DEFAULTSORT. And there will always be, as new articles are being created all the time. Why that mess? Sorting uppercase abbreviations before words would sound sensible to me, and it would require no DEFAULTSORTs there. — Pt _(T) 08:27, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, please expand. What is the standard way to use DEFAULTSORT for alphabetical sorting of a mix of

• article names in sentence case (the usual)
• proper names in title case
• names in camelcase
• names in upper case? Nurg (talk) 04:08, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

For your information, there seems to be a more active thread about the same issues at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Archive_14#RfC_on_Sortkey_issue. — Pt _(T) 16:03, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

I just corrected the link in the above comment. The talk is no longer active but there are still unaddressed issues. Blue Rasberry (talk) 07:53, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

New category

It is possible someone at Wikipedia could add a new category called Gastropubs. Gastropub already has an article listed here on Wikipedia, it is a type of restuarant.98.151.53.27 (talk) 04:29, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

This is not the place to request new categories. Please go to Wikipedia:Article wizard/Category. McLerristarr | Mclay1 06:52, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Sort order

In the section Sort order, it says "Z" comes before "a". This used to be true but now pages are sorting so that upper- and lower-case letters are equal. Is this a recent update or is it something to do with my computer and/or Internet? If it has been fixed, the section needs updating. McLerristarr | Mclay1 06:54, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

It only sorts pages in the right order in categories. They're still in pseudo-alphabetical order in Special:AllPages. McLerristarr | Mclay1 06:59, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

But this page is about Categories. So the explanation of alphabetical order should describe the order as it applies to Categories.

I had been making much use of the pseudo-alphabetical order that used to apply to Category pages. I tidied up MANY pages of this or that genus of plants and made them much easier to read (and received thanks from quite a few people--some of whom had reverted my changes as vandalism, but saw the usefulness of what I was doing, once I explained it).

But it seems the change is permanent. So this page should describe the new way of ordering. 140.147.236.195 (talk) 18:06, 17 June 2011 (UTC)Stephen Kosciesza

I noticed this just today. Let's discuss it with the tech experts at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Category sort order (lower case no longer?) Rkitko ^(talk) 15:44, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Lower-case titles

The Category guidelines say: A category name can be any string which would be a legitimate page title. It cannot begin with a lower-case letter. If the category name given in a category declaration begins with a lower-case letter, then it is interpreted as if it were capitalized. But lower-case letters are explictly permitted as page titles for people who style their name thusly (e.g., k.d. lang), so why this inconsistency in Wiki guidelines? Casey (talk) 19:30, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Not really, the article is technically called K.d. lang (look at the address bar), it's just that {{lowercase title}} makes it appear like the title was actually lowercase. And you can use the same template on categories. User<Svick>.Talk(); 19:38, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

OK, tnx. I understand now that ALL article titles must start upper-case as far as internal Wiki handling is concerned (even if forced to be displayed lower case on the page itself), and I suppose this constraint may have to do with sorting and alphabetizing. (Certainly "k.d. lang" should appear among the other "K's" in the "L" section rather than after the "Z's".) Casey (talk) 21:15, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Lower-case letters do not appear after "Z" any more. See the section above. McLerristarr | Mclay1 04:59, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Updating WP:NAMESORT

I'm trying to update WP:NAMESORT, the guideline on how to sort people's names. I'm trying to reference why something is done and give help for names in certain areas or countries. Your comments are needed at: Wikipedia talk:Categorization of people#Updating WP:NAMESORT. Bgwhite (talk) 21:24, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

MediaWiki 1.19

From the MediaWiki 1.19 release notes: bug 16755http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16755 Add options 'noreplace' and 'noerror' to {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} to stop it from replace an already existing default sort, and suppress error.