Talk:Community Wishlist/W221

Useful

This would be useful in many sorts of contexts or applications. I don't think your example is good as I don't know why one would search for that. Don't know if many date categories would become redundant or just more reliable and complete if this was implemented.

What I meant to say is that I just asked about this in the following issue and you may want to link this issue and/or the Wish of it as these are very similar or alternative approaches to the same thing (I think a date range filter would be more useful than sorting by date and when either is implemented the other probably could be added alongside in one go): phab:T329961. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:53, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

I agree that this would be a useful addition —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:52, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you

@Nosferattus, thank you for sharing a problem with the Community Wishlist. We will get back to you with further questions if need be. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 13:16, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Sorting too

I think it may be a good idea to add sorting to the wish title and description and if you prefer not or it would be better to keep this separate from sorting, maybe I would make another wish about sorting.

Many people I think would occasionally like to sort files by date taken there – for example specifying a date range and then sorting by date. The phab issue about that is linked in my comment further up. I think it could maybe be implemented via enabling searching the fields of the File information template which would also be useful for other things as described at that link. Maybe the structured data Inception field could be used. Note I think many files on Commons (maybe sb could clarify how many) do yet not have their SD set by the bot that does it and for some files I removed an obviously false date where I'm not sure if that is still in the Inception field. Regarding images being hidden away behind endless subcategories see c:Help:Gadget-DeepcatSearch – I think the deepcategory search functionality needs some improvements (phab:T376440#10354943), like making it easy to exclude certain subcategories, but for many cases (like this) it already works fairly well with the biggest problem in such cases being that it's not made available to visitors who are not very active contributors who happen to have read up on that search parameter and gave it a few tries. Prototyperspective (talk) 01:08, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

A challenge if this gets implemented

Jmabel raised an issue with this in a discussion on my talk page – I'll just quote and also include my reply because I think it's useful to have info about major challenges with wishes in one place (wish description and/or wish talk page):

how do you compare a precise date in 1894 to "between 1890 and 1914" to "19th century", to "no date", etc.? things like "between 1890 and 1914" are very rare and these could get excluded in the results with if possible a note at top showing the number of excluded files. files with broad dates like 19th century could be sorted as if it was 1900, ideally with a note underneath these files' titles.
You make a good point though. This has caveats and could be quite difficult to implement with good precision. Nevertheless, it would be very useful also if it doesn't work perfectly and if there are some searches & cats where this wouldn't work well at all. One application would be for populating a date-specific category – one could then maybe put 9x% of files into the category that belong into it and then work on the later identified remainder which have e.g. no or a very unspecific date.

Should also add that time-related categories could maybe be used for this either directly or by adding the info in them to the structured data and/or date field and then using that. E.g. if the file has a cat like c:Videos of 2023 from Prague, it can be inferred that the file was taken in 2023 even if there is no or no readable date in the Information template's date field or the structured data. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:23, 10 December 2025 (UTC)