I wrote:
One thing that I would like to do in Wikipedia is:
A category that spans a scale, e.g. people by date of birth.
Thinking of it, here's what we could do:
Allow a category page to specify how many items should be listed per page, instead of the default 200. Maybe some categories are better off with 50 or 500.
Allow a category page to specify how items should be listed by naming a template, to which both the item (page name) and sort key should be submitted.
Allow a category page to specify what datatype the sort key is. In addition to the default alphabetic, numeric values and dates could be very useful. Both ascending (normal) and descending (reverse) sorting should also be possible to specify.
E.g. for a category "bridges by length", the category page might contain:
{| class="wikitable sortable" |- ! Length (metres) !! Bridge {{#Category: sort="numeric descending"|template=mybridge|perpage=100}} |}
The idea here is that, given two bridges, the wiki would generate the category page as:
{| class="wikitable sortable" |- ! Bridge !! Length (metres) {{mybridge|2737.4|Golden Gate Bridge}} {{mybridge|1825|Brooklyn Bridge}} |}
And Template:mybridge could be defined by the user as
|- | [[{{{2}}}]] | <table><tr><td align=center width={{#expr:{{{1}}}/10}}px bgcolor=lightgreen>{{{1}}}</td></tr></table>
Here, the <table> inside the table cell makes a bar graph representing the length by 273 pixels for the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, and 182 pixels for the length of the Brooklyn Bridge.
An example is shown at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LA2
Possibly, the template should also receive, as another parameter, the distance to the next sort key, which could be useful for placing items on a scale.