Brion Vibber wrote:
If you override it, say [[Category:Programmer|Torvalds, Linus]], then he'll be sorted in the T's, though he'll still be listed as "Linus Torvalds".
Is this where you think, maybe we really should have less free-form, more predefined fields for some categories, especially persons, e.g.
[[person: surname = Torvalds givenname = Linus sex = male birthyear = 1969 nationality = Finland, United States occupation = programmer]]
or (to make it an IMDb clone) films:
[[movie: title = Kill Bill II director = Quentin Tarantino year = 2004]]
I'm just thinking out loud here.
This would not replace the free text, but fill the same role as the fact box for countries, where their population, area, etc. are listed.
The data input in this way could be rendered as a table or as plain text, and it could additionally be stored in a SQL table where smart searches can be made on people born in the same year, etc. An example of such a search tool is http://runeberg.org/search.pl where you can search 27,000 Scandinavian writers and artists. (Torvalds is in there.)