Sorting lists and tables

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Now listed as http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=494

I feel we should extend the WikiSyntax to include a meta tag for specifying that a section is going to be a lexically sorted list, so that in whatever order Wikipedians add entries to the list, the list will always be rendered in a lexically sorted order.

Support. I support your idea and would like to extend your proposal with a request for a function which sorts table column(s).
Lexically sorting should be possible (difficult, because somehow language and country dependent ...) and I also need time/date sorting according to entries which have ISO dates in sortable forms such as CCYYMMDDHHMMSS .
A tag could be an extension of the Wiki table syntax, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Table#Guide_to_the_pipe_syntax --Nyxos 19:05, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Now listed as http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=494
An extension of this concept is to allow spreadsheet calculations. --Tom Gries (talk) [mail me] 14:35, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

From Help:Sorting: Tables can be made sortable via client-side JavaScript with class="sortable". This works in Mediawiki 1.9 installed on all Mediawiki projects. The table gets arrows in each of its header cells. Clicking them will cause the table rows to sort based on the selected column, in ascending order first, and subsequently toggling between ascending and descending order. --128.250.80.15 01:32, 10 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]