Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Categories/Context-dependent sort key/Proposal

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  • Problem: In most Wiktionary projects, words of different languages share a page if their spellings are identical. Currently, the magic word DEFAULTSORT works for an entire page, which means we cannot define a default sort key for each language in the same page. That is an issue especially for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (hanja). They share characters but their sort keys are totally different (radicals or pinyin for Chinese, kana for Japanese, hangeul for Korean). If it is allowed to define a default sort key for each section, it will be much easier to correctly categorize pages.
  • Proposed solution: Introduction of a new magic word, say, SECTIONSORT, that works for all categories after it up to the next usage of the same magic word. SECTIONSORT should override DEFAULTSORT if both are defined. The use of SECTIONSORT without a sort key should clear the previous sort key (and should not define an empty sort key).
  • Who would benefit: Editors of Wiktionary, especially those who edit Chinese and Japanese entries.
  • More comments: See Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Wiktionary/Context-dependent sort key for a discussion in 2017. It is still a problem. See Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Wiktionary/Context-dependent sort key for further discussion (and support).
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T183747
  • Proposer: Urhixidur (talk) 20:38, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]