I want to use programatic scripts to work with the i18n files across MediaWiki. I wrote a script to allow me to add messages, and easily update message keys as well as scan for missing qqq codes [1] The problem I am running into is that an object is an unordered set of name/value pairs and in Python (at least to my knowledge) key order varies across Python implementations. So if I programmatically like in my script [1] I want to manipulate the JSON, when re-writing it, I'm struggling to maintain the original order. I wonder if thus it would be useful to sort all our i18n messages in alphabetical order. I feel this would be a good thing as it would encourage naming messages in such a way that they appear in the same order. E.g for an editing interface you might have myeditor-button-save myeditor-button-edit How does translatewiki build the i18n files? Is this just a python problem? [1] https://github.com/jdlrobson/WikimediaMessageDevScript