Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Categories/Display Multi-column sorted categories

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Display Multi-column sorted categories

  • Problem: Currently categories are displayed at the bottom of the page as one big concatenated sequence of (unsorted) categories. It is very complicated for the user to search for the correct category to click on, especially with long lists of categories. The user has as only option as to scan sequentially the list left to right until the end before deciding one finds any matching category, or not.
  • Who would benefit: All MediaWiki users (so basically everybody).
  • Proposed solution: Display Multi-column sorted categories. Instead of an unreadable old-style, concatenated, unsorted, long list of categories you can now choose to display your page categories as a modern, multi-column, sorted table. A really nice and readable layout for MediaWiki page categories. Very easy to implement. This way one can scan from top to bottom and left to right in sorted columns, just like e.g. in a multi-column Linux directory list...
  • More comments: A few lines of code needs to changed in Skin.php. And one single line of CSS code to be added: .mw-normal-catlinks { column-count:6; -moz-column-count:6; -webkit-column-count:6 }
  • Phabricator tickets: See mw:Snippets/Multi-column sorted categories for a working example
  • Proposer: Geert Van Pamel (WMBE) (talk) 15:30, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • I note that currently the categories are displayed in the order they're added by the wikitext. For visible categories on the page, editors sometimes take advantage of this feature.

    I also note that the linked "change" loses semantic formatting that is likely useful for people using screen readers, although it seems likely that loss isn't a required part of this proposal. Anomie (talk) 16:39, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting