Last modified: 2014-05-17 17:26:15 UTC
The Category function is not translating well into Wikinews. The biggest problem with categories is that we cannot sort by date to make the newest stories appear on top. Compare http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Culture_and_entertainment with http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Culture_and_entertainment_test. In essence, after 50 staries are written on a given topic, a category becomes virtually useless since alphabetic sort yileds results where it is impossible to tell the difference between a story written last year or last night. And with a [[Category:Topic|YYYMMDD]] sort, the OLDEST appears on top - which makes the task of finding the newest story a scroll hunt for the reader.
(In reply to comment #0) > The Category function is not translating well into Wikinews. The biggest problem > with categories is that we cannot sort by date to make the newest stories appear > on top. Compare http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Culture_and_entertainment > with http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Culture_and_entertainment_test. > > In essence, after 50 staries are written on a given topic, a category becomes > virtually useless since alphabetic sort yileds results where it is impossible to > tell the difference between a story written last year or last night. > > And with a [[Category:Topic|YYYMMDD]] sort, the OLDEST appears on top - which > makes the task of finding the newest story a scroll hunt for the reader. Could you describe what you'd like the category page to look like for this? Would the date of the article be included in the category page listing? Would the date in question be the last modified date of the article, or something that is included in the sort key? You want the names sorted ascending alphabetically, but then descending by date? Or would some tag on the category page indicating a descending sort be sufficient?
This would be useful for maintainance categories where we are using them as FIFO queues. In this case, the date should be taken as the point at which the category tag was added to the article. Though most of these categories actually use templates to do that, so detecting that is slightly more complex than you might think. But certainly doable.
I think this should be the date the category was added to the article. As for headings I would see this as the date. (December 21, 2005) or possibly the month and year (December, 2005). One posibility Is to do it somewhat similiar to the experimental date techinique for the google cat ( http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google/date#Date-order ). I think a little link should be at the (next 200) line where it could say (sort by date)
I actually need to be able to list it by a specified date, not by the date the entry is entered into the site, as I am creating a timeline for my RPG group. It's a similar problem with the categories, I need to be able to have dates (preferably the year) for the headings, rather than a single number or letter http://www.ucip.org/beta/index.php/Category:Timeline
*** Bug 5561 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 14287 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Wikinews seems to have solved the problem with RSS feedbs and templates, which looks like the right approach for this use case. https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Culture_and_entertainment (In reply to Jaeneva from comment #4) > I actually need to be able to list it by a specified date, not by the date > the entry is entered into the site, as I am creating a timeline for my RPG > group. > It's a similar problem with the categories, I need to be able to have dates > (preferably the year) for the headings, rather than a single number or letter > http://www.ucip.org/beta/index.php/Category:Timeline Maybe categories alone are not a tool for this kind of job? A category cannot dig into the content of an article to find a specific date field. This is a work for templates.
How about https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CategorySortHeaders . Note: wikinews uses dynamic page list for its lists.
Also failing all else, you could probably use semantic mediawiki for your purposes.
Considering that the original problem is solved (the Wikinews use case), that other solutions exist to solve this problem, and that including this feature in MediaWiki Core seems unlikely, can we close this report as wontfix?
(In reply to Quim Gil from comment #10) > Considering that the original problem is solved (the Wikinews use case), > that other solutions exist to solve this problem, and that including this > feature in MediaWiki Core seems unlikely, can we close this report as > wontfix? Oh, I totally thought comment 4 was the original bug when making my last comment. I'm actually not sure that the original bug is that unlikely to be included in MediaWiki core. People on enwikipedia often say things like they wish that maintenance categories could be sorted by date. If liangent's category sorting branch ever gets merged, I think it would make sense to also add this feature to his/her code. After all, at that point we would both have an interface for it, as well as the database schema support for it. I think this is a valid low-priority enhancement request.
