Talk:Community Wishlist/W275

English translation

As the page hasn't been marked for translation as a submitted (non-open) wish, I figured I'd translate the original text from Norwegian bokmål to English:

Sorting of a page's categories

In many cases, especially in articles on Wikipedia projects, it is desirable to have similar categories next to each other. If they are, it appears to be intentional and tidy. I assume this could be especially useful in biographies and releases (such as games, movies, etc.).

As an example, in an article about a video game, one may find categories that relate to its genres, platforms, release year, place of development, awards, and gameplay, as well as a category for the game series and/or developer.

If a reader sees these categories:

• Video games with a battle royale mode, Xbox 360 games, Free-to-play video games, Windows games, Video games developed by Valve, Counter-Strike, Video games from 2012, The Game Awards winners, PlayStation 3 games, MacOS games, Video games developed in the United states, Linux games

...  they may appear somewhat cluttered and thoughtless, but if these are grouped by the categories' main focus:

• Counter-Strike, Video games developed by Valve, Free-to-play video games, Windows games, Linux games, MacOS games, PlayStation 3 games, Xbox 360 games, Video games from 2012, Video games developed in the United States, Video games with a battle royale mode, The Game Awards winners

... they may appear intentional and might make it easier to understand the goal of the categories. In this case, the main mess-causing culprit are the platforms (PlayStation 3, Windows, etc.), while in larger category clusters, there may be more award categories, more developers, more release years (for different editions), different development countries – and in other articles, such as biographies, there may be different name categories, years of birth and death, work titles, and other topics that gladly could be grouped up.

If there was a way to make these categories appear in consistent groupings, it would make catgories in (primarily) Wikipedia articles easier to understand for readers and contributors.

Primarily affects readers, eventually contributors that have to discuss usage of this system

Thank you! EdoAug (talk) 22:18, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Where is the sort order defined

Currently the sort order is the order as in the wikitext. As I understand it, you want to ignore the wikitext order and 'group' the categories automatically and then order the categories with the group, as well as order the groups relative to each other ? It is not clear to me where this concept of a group and order would be defined or sourced from... the only method I see that would be able to do this as a human would do it, would be some sort of AI/Machine learning ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:39, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

I didn't want to provide a solution, as this is discouraged in the wish tips page. My instant thought was something akin to hidden categories, where one can assign some sort of number (similar to the css z-index), where it would visibly be sorted by this number. This could hopefully be applied by templates, also (like hidden categories). EdoAug (talk) 18:55, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

@EdoAug thanks for submitting and sharing a translated version of the wish. I appreciate not getting too deep into a proposed solution. Regarding the problem you're trying to solve, it sounds like you believe that the order in wikitext is not sufficient to end users. I'm curious if you think there's a way to make consistent groupings scale across categories, namespaces, and wikis.

The key challenge, IMO, is that hidden categories might solve for a specific type of content (ie, gaming), but would still rely on contributors to define and edit such groupings. And, that effort could be quite large for a handful of editors. Still a worthwhile wish nonetheless. JWheeler-WMF (talk) 15:05, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

@JWheeler-WMF: Absolutely. It would potentially require a lot of manual labour for projects that choose to use such a feature. I'm sure that, with some deliberation, these could also be assigned using bots or AutoWikiBrowser (provided they have a wikitext-friendly format)! All-in-all, the goal is to present the articles better, including their categories. EdoAug (talk) 23:12, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

@EdoAug "I didn't want to provide a solution". That is 100% correct, but that doesn't exclude talking through ideas and solutions on the discussion page :) I'm posing hypotheticals here, in order to refine our collective thoughts about this, so that we understand we are tackling the right problem (with the right amount of resourcing). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:13, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

@TheDJ: Ok, and I shared my thoughts. EdoAug (talk) 14:16, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

I see how this has impact, and there's also a "dupe" wish here. Community Wishlist/Wishes/Sorting of Categories.

From a solution standpoint, would an option to sort categories A-Z (or reverse) be helpful, or are you looking for something more nuanced? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 22:07, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Alphabetically could be useful in some cases, but I am uncertain if it's useful in most Wikipedia-related cases! Having some sort of grouping (and maybe alphabetically within those?) would be a lot more useful. EdoAug (talk) 12:42, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Support & idea

A problem is that people often change the category sorting to alphabetically. One could have a button that sorts them alphabetically instead of by topic. The problem with this issue is that it does not really describe a solution for how the goal could be be achieved. It may be difficult to sort them well automatically. A solution could be to set a category as a grouping category on its category page. For example, Category:People by time could be configured to be a grouping category so e.g. if a cat has "{year} births" and "{year} deaths in {country}" and "4th-century historians" set they would all display next to each other because they're all in subcats of that grouping cat. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:32, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Sort of

A list of categories arranged in well understood groups and suitably ordered within those groups would be fine, but the killer is the idea of "well understood". Different communities would have differing concepts of that grouping, so we would be building in a future of endless edit wars. Just displaying the categories in alphabetical order would be the simplest solutions. While not conceptually the most elegant, it has the advantage of being generally accepted as simple and good enough. It could also be an optional function of the skin – with the list being sorted at display time — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 13:40, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Disagree on that. This would be like anything else that is edited: discussed and decided upon if needed. Moreover, the sorting of the categories is not something many think of as overly important. And as you said, there could still be a setting to make it sorted entirely alphabetically (not just per group). Having categories grouped would make it easier to spot the cat(s) one is looking for and makes the cats more useful. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:31, 30 July 2025 (UTC)