On 17/03/2008, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/17/08, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
There is very little consensus about people making a point of having categories or interwiki links in a specific order or in separate parts of the document. What ordered metadata can you describe, other than the example with the comment that is used solely for ease of freetext editing and could be better defined in a permanent section on the discussion page? Unless there is any actual reason for wanting to have one category declared between a template and something else, when infact the position of declaration is completely meaningless, it seems like a distraction to talk about it being a lack of consensus.
I'm primarily talking about the crucial issue of whether interwiki links come before categories or after them. This matters a *lot*. To some people. It's one of those sort of irrational situations we have where X is ok, Y is ok, but changing X to Y is not ok. British English is ok. American English is ok. Converting British to American English is not ok. Interwikis then categories is ok. Cats then interwikis is ok. Moving interwikis before categories is not ok.
People argue about the most petty things. As I didn't realise about the ability to order the way categories are displayed I may be missing a dependency between interwiki's and categories, or it might just be people not realising their preference doesn't actually get displayed differently to anyone elses preference and hence they should just focus on the meaningful parts of the article.
The issue of the ordering of categories themselves is probably best solved by not reordering. Since category ordering affects the visual presentation, it's not really safe to just arbitrarily reorder them.
I stand corrected, I didn't realise that one could change the ordering of the categories by declaring them in a different order. I was under the naive impression that they were alphabetised and output generically (and that interwiki's did not interfere with categories or vice versa for that matter)
Peter