On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Mark A. Hershberger <
mhershberger(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/164 -- Support
collation by a certain
locale (sorting order of characters)
The main problem here seems to be that you can't *use* a locale- or
language-specific collation without writing additional custom code to
support one -- so it's not quite possible for the site administrators to
actually enable it on request or by default and batch-update the sort key
tables.
For example: bug 29788 "Sort Swedish letters ÅÄÖ correctly on Swedish
Wikipedia"
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29788
It kinda looks like all the infrastructure is there to use ICU's collations
for any supported locale, except that only 'root' (UCA default) ever gets
passed into the constructor; it sounds like it should not take a *lot* of
code to automatically slurp in the appropriate language if
available/configured.
Secondary problem is that the fixes implemented so far only work for
category listings, which is a tiny subset of things that get alphabetically
sorted and displayed. The biggest other ones are likely page listings in
Special:Allpages, Special:Prefixindex, Special:Listusers, etc.
(Personally I've never considered any of this too huge a problem overall as
we have primarily search-driven interfaces, not
browse-a-giant-list-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-pages interfaces;
traditional alphabetic indexing is a random-access assist and, for long
lists, is mostly replaced by keyword searching and typeahead suggestions
today. But those alpha lists do exist still, and they're consistently sorted
incorrectly, without even touching the collation support we now have. Should
at a minimum open up a new bug for those so it doesn't get forgotten.)
Tertiary problem is that things like the client-side table sorter also don't
get the benefit of the server-side collation support. (This should be split
out into a separate bug; table sorting does now have some basic support for
alternate-sorting arrangements but its collation table replacement approach
is probably not sufficient to provide more general sort compatibility)
-- brion