Wikipedia talk:Categorization

See also: Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories

Mis-corrected blank sort key: how much of a problem is this?

I'm not that much of a CAT-gnome, and I recently ran into a problem with a blank sort key that had been properly used in an article, until a well-meaning editor incorrectly "fixed" it by removing the blank, who I guess figured that a blank param is meaningless, so why not get rid of it. I undid their change, but I can understand why an editor might do that. I wonder how frequent a problem this is, because I've got an easy fix. The solution would be simply to create a template, maybe to be called {{Cat sort top}}, that resolves to a space. Nobody is going to remove a template call embedded in a Category item who doesn't understand precisely what it's doing there, so that will stop it from happening. But is it a problem that's frequent enough or annoying enough to bother with? Even if infrequent, it could be the kind of thing that would slip by without anyone noticing for quite a while. Mathglot (talk) 03:55, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Macau

An editor is actively getting around to remove Macau categories from parent categories for dependent territories or other similar categories and charging others for unconstructive editing.[1][2] I recognize that dependent territories are part of the scope of WikiProject Countries and there is a tree for dependent territories under that for countries. What people like them are doing is real unconstructive. Could anything be done to stop them? 113.52.112.27 (talk) 14:18, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

• You are apparently referring to User:Smasongarrison. Whether you like it or not, Macau is no longer a dependent territory of Portugal, it has been incorporated in China for a long time now. Having a bit of autonomy does not make it a dependent territory, if that were the case many provinces of many countries in the world would all of a sudden become a dependent territory. Marcocapelle (talk) 06:53, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

  FYI: This IP is Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/Hong Kong geography warrior Mason (talk) 21:44, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

DEFAULTSORT needs a new name

Moved from Help talk:Category

I've been editing WP assiduously for over 20 years, in which time I have corrected literally thousands of Defsorts that have been incorrectly specified.

The main offender is personal names, where we typically need the article to be sorted by surname, not by given name. For ex, Mervyn Jones would be Defsorted as "Jones, Mervyn". Simple, right? Well, it seems many, many editors just don't get it. They Defsort it as "Mervyn Jones", not realising that that produces exactly the same result as if Defaultsort were not used at all. In other words, whatever order the words are in the article title, will dictate the sorting of the article in its categories. That's UNLESS we use a Defaultsort using a parameter that is something OTHER than an exact copy of the article title.

What I'm getting to is this: The default sorting will be the article title, yet to change it to something else, we must use a magic word that includes the word "Default". That has always, always, always seemed counterintuitive to me. If you had a choice to either Keep or Change something in any sort of app, and you wanted to change it, you'd click the Change button, not the Keep button. Right? Same with Defaultsort, which is used when you actually want something OTHER than the actual default, which is the article title.

I'm certain that this simple bit of infelicitous nomenclature is the root cause of so many editors getting so wrong what to experienced editors is the simplest concept imagineable.

Is there any prospect of changing the name to something more likely to produce better outcomes? One idea might be CHANGESORT. I'm sure there are many others. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:08, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

DEFAULTSORT has been around for at least seventeen years. It's a bit late to ask for it to be changed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:04, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

And yet I'm asking. Your response is no argument against such a change. An analogy might be: Sending 12-year-old boys down the mines has been around for hundreds of years, so it's a bit late to raise the minimum age now.

On reflection, maybe this issue would best be raised @ Wikipedia talk:Categorization, so I'm moving it there. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:55, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

What I mean is that DEFAULTSORT is part of the MediaWiki software, it's not like a template that we might amend or rename with community consensus. The word DEFAULTSORT was chosen way back in December 2006 (see phab:T7908) and when it was incorporated into MediaWiki 1.9 (January 2007) it became set in stone. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:24, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

An article's title is the default default category sort key. The purpose of the DEFAULTSORT tag is to specify a different default. If you have an article about someone named Donna Farkle with no DEFAULTSORT tag and categories specified as

[[Category:Singers|Donna the Voice]]

[[Category:Wrestlers|Dynamite Donna]]

[[Category:Flight attendants]]

she'll be sorted on the three category pages, respectively, as "Donna the Voice", "Dynamite Donna", and, because it's the default default sort key, "Donna Farkle". If there's a {{DEFAULTSORT:Farkle, Donna}} tag, then she'll be sorted on the third category page as "Farkle, Donna", appearing under the Fs, because that's now the custom default category sort key for her. Largoplazo (talk) 22:07, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I understand all that, perfectly. My concern is that we're using the word "default" to get to something that is NOT the default. Its very purpose is to IGNORE the default (article title) and sort it as if it were something else, something we specify. This use of a word to mean something other than its apparent meaning is what, I am convinced, confuses most newbies and even some more experienced editors, and why I spend far too much of my time fixing their very understandable errors. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:24, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Your third sentence tells me that you didn't understand my comments perfectly. Its very purpose is to make the default key for this article's sorting in however many categories the article is associated with something other than what it would be. As I showed you, for categories where a specific sort key isn't given in the category tag itself, the default placement as specified by the DEFAULTSORT tag will be applied. Again, it specifies the default category sort key for that article. It isn't the default default that applies to article with no DEFAULTSORT tag, it's the default for that article. Largoplazo (talk) 23:52, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

JackofOz, I feel your pain! I mostly sort within list categories. I can't tell you how many time I've seen {{DEFAULTSORT:List of...}} in an article titled "List of...". Completely pointless. I see it so much, I usually don't even bother to fix it any more (as long as the cats are individually sorted correctly). It took me just a couple minutes to find an example at List of power stations in New South Wales:

{{DEFAULTSORT:List Of Power Stations In New South Wales}}

[[Category:Lists of power stations in Australia|New South Wales]]

[[Category:Power stations in New South Wales| ]]

[[Category:Lists of buildings and structures in New South Wales|Power stations]]

I also often see situations where there is a plausible DEFAULTSORT, but it's only really doing work on a single cat. The others have correct overrides — individually sorted with standard sorting keys — which is almost just as pointless use of DEFAULTSORT because the only cat without its own sort key, might as well have one and lose the DEFAULTSORT. Honestly I'm not a huge fan of DEFAULTSORT in general. I use it on occasion, for people's names, but other than that I usually just sort individually. Also note, when using HotCat you don't see the existing DEFAULTSORT code anyway, so there are times where I've added the sort key along with a new category, unaware if it's already defaultsorted the same way or not.

As for what it should be called, I see your point, but the name "DEFAULTSORT" does hint that it is overridden by the standard sort keys. With another name, that may be even less clear. DB1729^talk 00:56, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

I think DEFAULTSORT is clear enough: it's the way in which the article will be sorted, by default; a sortkey which can be over-ridden for any particular category. Yes, some editors get it wrong, but editors get a lot of things wrong. If they add an unnecessary DEFAULTSORT equalling the article title, no harm is done.

Someone said above that DEFAULTSORT mostly applies to personal names; the other huge category is titles which start with an article - names of books, newspapers, films, paintings, etc - where we need to sort on the words after the article: "Night Manager, The". PamD 23:07, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that was me. And I agree, titles starting with "The" or "A" (and their foreign language equivalents, "Le", "Les", "Il, "I", "Gli", "La", et al) are also a major issue for those who seem not to care where articles end up in their categories. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:33, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Indeed. My comment above may have also implied that I only use it for names of people. I forgot that titles beginning with "The", "A", etc. is another case where DEFAULTSORT is quite handy and I do use it for that as well. DB1729^talk 03:07, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Sentence structure help needed

Apologies if this is in the wrong place.

I'm really struggling with this sentence: "The central goal of the category system is to provide navigational links to pages in Wikipedia, in a hierarchy of categories which readers, knowing essential—defining—characteristics of a topic, can browse and quickly find sets of pages on topics that are defined by those characteristics."

I started to make minor edits, but realized I wasn't even sure what it was trying to convey. "Which" should probably be "that", the punctuation is random, there's no agreement between subject/verb/object, and it's run-on. I've taken my best stab and edited it to read: "The central goal of the category system is to provide navigational links to pages in Wikipedia within a hierarchy of categories. Using essential, defining characteristics of a topic, readers can browse and quickly find sets of pages on topics that are defined by those characteristics." Ghost writer's cat (talk) 22:51, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Sort order not merging all diacritics

Wikipedia:Categorization#Sort keys says "In English Wikipedia, sort order merges (ignores) case and diacritics." I dearly wish this was true, but it appears it is untrue for macrons (a diacritic), and always has been. Am I missing something or is the statement inaccurate? Nurg (talk) 04:53, 14 April 2024 (UTC)