Last modified: 2009-07-30 23:41:33 UTC
Community of Polish Wikinews finds current MediaWiki organisation of articles in category not applicable to Wikinews: users are completely not interested in browsing articles by title; readers of news services are accustomed to articles organized by date. What we would like to have is making all articles from main namespace being sorted by creation date (newest first) in categories; it can be an option or can well be default behaviour, as we don't need alphabetical sorting beyond Wikinews:, Portal: and similar namespaces. Please note that we need ordering by _creation_ (first edit) date, not last edit date. Current DynamicPageList extension cannot be true solution here from a number of reasons: it shows articles sorted by last edit date (making it hardly useful, because even old articles can be always modified, in example by CommonsDelinker, an appear on the very top). It shows only limited number of articles. There are rumours that this extension causes server performance problems. Finally, there is a need of manual intervention to add DPL to a category. If Wikinews is to compete with modern news services, using "tags" (which make browsing articles much easier), it cannot rely on DPL, because there is not enough people to add DPL everywhere.
Such functionality does not exist, it would need to be programmed. Changed summary slightly to clarify.
What if a new Magic word were implemented. Similar to {{DISPLAYTITLE:New Title}}, what if we had a {{SORTCATEGORY:Date/Title/Etc}}?
As I have written above: we are not interested in manual intervention to fix sorting in category. This is a complete waste of time, we have too few people and to many categories to do this (and there will always come new categories). Actually we don't need alphabetical sorting at all, so the best solution would be to make sorting by date default.
Why would changing the default behavior of categories solely to help Wikinews be a good idea?
I'm talking only about _Polish_ _Wikinews_. Every single wiki has its own code and separate part of database. It is technically possible that Polish Wikinews had completely different handling of categories than for example English Wikinews. Making consensus between various projects requires lots of effort so I am writing here only on behalf of Polish Wikinews, because this way we don't need to wait for anyone. If other Wikinews versions found this feature useful, they would have the possibility to ask for the same modification for them.
No, the code is identical across all projects. Forking the code just to enact a minor tweak like this for a single project wouldn't be smart. A global config value ($wgCategorySortType) or a per-category magic work (as I suggested above) would be the two ways to properly implement this.
A magic word _on the category page_ to switch sort modes might do the trick. Date sorting is available internally in the DB (as used by dynamicpagelist), so in theory at list it wouldn't be insanely hard to make such a view change possible.
This sounds similar to bug 1289
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1289 ***
