On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Mark A. Hershberger < mhershberger@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