On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Marcus Buck <wiki(a)marcusbuck.org> wrote:
Here is, what I in my simple mind think, how it would
be solvable (I'm
sure my thoughts are too simple, but I want to understand, why and in
what way they are too simple) . As an example I take the German language:
Take the pagename and make it uppercase (could be lowercase too, but
uppercase seems better as the first letter will show up in the
category). str_replace "Ä" with "A", "Ö" with
"O", "Ü" with "U" and "ß"
with "SS". Also str_replace other Latin characters with diacritics with
their counterpart without diacritic. And that's our sortkey. This very
simple procedure should reduce the number of necessary defaultsorts
(except for articles about persons) by about 90% in the German wikipedia.
This would absolutely be possible as a "mostly works" solution for
category sorting. It would mostly just need to have the appropriate
code written. The only serious problem with it is that if the rules
for automatic default sorting changed, a script of some sort would
probably have to reparse all pages in some cases to figure out the
original sort key provided, which would be kind of expensive.
Of course, this solution is actually woefully incomplete even for
German. It only affects category pages, not the zillion other places
where pages are sorted by names (Special:AllPages, etc.). But it
would be a reasonable step forward if anyone wanted to do the coding
required.