Encyc talk:Questions

From Encyc

What would you like to know?

What does defaultsort do?

What does defaultsort do? I'm feeling too lazy to look it up. Auggie 03:09, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

When you look at a category page, pages with that category are by default displayed in alphabetical order. This may be overridden by typing say

[[Category:People|Smith, John]]

to sort it under S rather than J. It is more efficient to use DEFAULTSORT to override all category sorts.

I still don't understand. If you do nothing, shouldn't the behavior already be "default"? Auggie 16:31, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps I can help. If you have several categories all with the same category sort key, this could be done in one of two ways. I can't get it to display properly so just look at it in edit mode.

[[Category:Cat1|Smith, John]] [[Category:Cat2|Smith, John]] [[Category:Cat3|Smith, John]] [[Category:Cat4|Smith, John]] [[Category:Cat1]] [[Category:Cat2]] [[Category:Cat3]] [[Category:Cat4]] {{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, John}}--Salisbury 20:08, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to be honest here, and please forgive me if it sounds undiplomatic. This looks like nerdy computer code to me, and I'm not sure it provides any tangible benefit for our writers or our readers. Is the intention to have people be able to look at category pages and browse by last name? If that's all it is, I think that the benefit is outweighed by the cost of having this user-unfriendly gobbledygook at the bottom of every page, and having Recent Changes cluttered with unmeaningful edits, not to mention all the time devoted by writers who could be generating content instead of bits of code. Just my opinion, and I'm not trying to pull rank or anything. I'm just very wary of anything that makes wiki editing harder to understand. Auggie 22:32, 22 June 2010 (UTC)