Last modified: 2006-03-04 16:48:42 UTC
Some categories require not just the normal piping (such as [[Category:1945 births|Smith, John]]), but manipulation of how the links are presented on the category page. In the sample I cite above, all aircraft are categorised by manufacturer except U.S. military aircraft with nicknames. The Consolidated PB3Y and the R3Y Tradewind, for example, are made by the same company but placed under different letters. The category tag in for the R3Y could be piped of course ([[Category:Seaplanes and flying boats|Consolidated R3Y Tradewind]]), but a passerby would be bewildered why an 'R' article was appearing in the 'C' section. Moving the article to a new title seems like overkill, and violates WP:MOS. The easiest solution is a kind of uber-pipe, so that [[Category:Seaplanes and flying boats||Consolidated R3Y Tradewind]] (or whatever syntax is implemented) will cause the link on the category page to show up as 'Consolidated R3Y Tradewind' instead of 'R3Y Tradewind'. My apologies if this isn't explained very well. I spent half an hour writing a good explanation which promptly got deleted when I entered an invalid keyword.
It's a nice explanation but it's lacking in a fairly critical area, namely, you haven't said what it is you'd like us to change.
As I get it, you should change markup so that double pipe within [[Category: ]] links would determine under which article name should the article be listed in the appropriate category.
Oh, that's embarassing. Here's what I want to change: A new feature should be added that allows manipulation of the links on the Category page. With the double pipe, or whatever syntax is eventually employed, [[Category:Foo||Bar]] does not just make the article sort as if it were titled 'Bar', it also changes the title seen on the category page.
Please note that I am not proposing that we use the 'uber-piping' described in the example above. It should '''only''' be used for a relatively specialised group of category. Thusfar, the only ones I can come up with are multinational aircraft categories and American aircraft categories that include both civil and military.
That would be extremely useful. Page naming conventions and category sorting conventions are not always one and the same.
It would also be appropriate for all biography articles. Last, First is the conventional way to order things. Likewise for a vast variety of articles, really; it's just completely confusing for things to be ordered differently from how they're written out.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 491 ***
This bug has been marked resolved, though I haven't seen it in action yet. One final addendum: my proposal above is slightly flawed, because the name under which an article should be categorised by is not always the same as the name of the link displayed. In the example above, the R3Y Tradewind, the category tag should look like [[Category:Seaplanes and flying boats|Consolidated RY3 Tradewind|Consolidated R3Y Tradewind]]. This will make the link displayed on the category page appear as 'R3Y', but will alphabetise it as RY3. This is because of the U.S. Navy designation system, in which the letters 'R3Y' are read as 'the third (3) cargo plane (R) built for the navy by Consolidated (Y)'. Thus, it makes more sense to have the planes in the order RD, R2D, R3D, R4D, RY, R2Y, R3Y than it does to order them RD, RY, R2D, R2Y, R3D, R3Y, R4D. In general, maximising flexibility in this manner is probably the most prudent thing to do, because we don't always know that the preferred link title is the same as the proper title for alphabetisation.
(In reply to comment #8) > This bug has been marked resolved, though I haven't seen it in action yet. It's also been marked as a duplicate of bug 491 which hasn't been resolved. Hence the reason you haven't seen it yet.
