Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals/archives/2020/October

Unsorting categories

I have a proposal in the nature of "having our cake and eating it too". Last summer, as part of upgrading our person categories, SVTCobra added DEFAULTSORT: to all of them, to produce default alphabetical-by-surname listing order. On one hand I appreciate the value of the additional information. On the other hand, I would really like for us to avoid using DEFAULTSORT: for anything, anywhere on the project. I see a way to keep the information and at the same time eliminate the DEFAULTSORT:.

Amongst the disadvantages of DEFAULTSORT:, it creates an additional burden for users maintaining our categories, adding one more thing about it keep track of (which should not be underestimated: making things simple on a wiki is staggeringly important, and a major focus of all our infrastructure efforts on en.wn, both past and present); and it's actually hard to find things when reading a list that's alphabetically by surname but the list entries are in a different order. So the default list of pages in a category should, I think, always follow the actual alphabetical order of the names of the pages.

Solution: Set up a category called, say, Person mainspace redirects, in which to put all the mainspace redirects for people's names. Put in this category all mainspace redirects for people's names. Add redirects for the surname-first variants (for example, Joe Biden would be listed under both "Joe Biden" and "Biden, Joe"). Thus, by looking at the new category, one would see an alphabetical listing of all the variants, and each entry would appear in order consistent with the form of the entry (thus, "Joe Biden" would be with the "J"s, "Biden, Joe" with the "B"s).

If we really wanted a list that would include only the surname-first variants, we could have a subcategory like that, though my inclination would be to keep things simpler.

I imagine we'd want to add a usage note to Category:News articles by person, at the same time. --Pi zero (talk) 16:22, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

That seems like more overhead to maintain. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:28, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

It's one less feature ( not using DEFAULTSORT: ), and the (smaller, I'd say) alternative thing to do is more distributed as a separate concern. --Pi zero (talk) 18:35, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Without having put a great amount of thought into it, I'd say we'd be better off integrating Wikidata more effectively. I guess the difference is thinking like a librarian versus thinking like a computer scientist. But isn't there already an easy way of listing page names alphabetically via a query? Cheers, --SVTCobra 00:58, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

We've avoided piping in anything from Wikidata, unless there's a human decision as gatekeeper (which I'd like eventually to make easier by means of carefully-thought-out semi-automation). Because, at bedrock, we vet everything here, whereas Wikidata is at best in the same not-trust-worthy-as-such class as en.wp. --Pi zero (talk) 13:04, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

Change Category:Kiev to Category:Kyiv or not?

Note that English Wikipedia has, after several dozens-by-dozens of discussions, decided in the last month that they approved such a rename, despite the #KyivNotKiev campaign is fair for all the English-speaking websites or not, I think this will not make many hurts to our articles? --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 06:01, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

Will have to give this some looking into (I'd link to Wiktionary's entry for "copious free time" but, alas, they've deleted it). We tend to be very conservative about renaming categories; it's not, after all, going to affect the way it's spelled in any of our archived articles (except in the list of categories down at the bottom). Which said, we do occasionally get around to renaming categories if it's sufficiently badly needed; for example, in 2018 we finally renamed our category for Pakistan's "North-West Frontier Province" to "Khyber Pakhtunkhwa" — eight years after the province itself was renamed. --Pi zero (talk) 13:27, 21 October 2020 (UTC)