Are sort keys not supported for categories?

Question

I see that wiki markup includes the option of a sortkey (e.g. [[:category:category name|sortkey]]) but this does not seem to work on WikiTree.  If this by design or is this a flaw?

Comments

It works for subcategories, but not for person-profiles, except in the Unsourced_Profiles category.

It's because WikiTree sorts by person-name not page-name.  The sort key overrides the page-name, but the person-name overrides both.

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Thanks for the prompt answer!

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If RJs comment had been an answer I would immediatel have marked it as best answer.

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So if I undersatnd this correctly, a sort key could be used in a category for a freespace page? I just tried this on a freespace page and it didn't work:

[[Category:The American Genealogist | American Genealogist, The]] (with no spaces before or after the pipe)

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Sortkeys in categories sort the categories contained within it. They do not sort profiles of either type.

So, in this category:https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:United_States_Navy_Ships%2C_World_War_II the ships are sorted by the name of the ship by using the pipe followed by the ship name but the lone space page (which is a profile) is not sorted and cannot be sorted.

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Unfortunately, no, Jillaine, it doesn't work in a freespace page.

It only works in subcategories. Example: if you are on the category page for "Massachusetts, Smith Name Study" and for parent category you type [[Category:Massachusetts Name Studies|Smith]] then "Massachusetts, Smith Name Study" will be listed under Smith on the Massachusetts, Name Studies category page instead of being lumped with all the Ms.

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So in the Sources by Title category, we've got all those pages that start with "The..." and we can't sort them by the second word?

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No, we cannot. Nor can we sort "A" or "An" or anything else. Never could and the old Category:Source had the same issue.

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According to my experiments, if you were to create Space:American_Genealogist and then change the page title later, it would still sort under A.

There might be other disadvantages in having the title different from the pagename.

(And of course there are known disadvantages in having commas in pagenames.)

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Natalie, so all those pages in sources have to be split up manually by name?

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Yes they do. I work on it when I have time but there are about 5,000 of them.

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tell me what order they are being put in so I can do my share

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Can you explain what you mean by "split up manually by name"?

what would it take for the pipe feature to apply to the sorting of freespace pages?

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We renamed C:Source to C:Sources by Name and employed EditBot to do over 90% of it (we began to move the sources manually, but it was going to take a very long time.) So now that they are moved, they really need the further categories we created, such as C:Sources by Topic or C:Sources by Location, etc.

The pipe character sorting freespace? I would suggest you email someone on the tech team with the question.

Answer 1

Edited:  Removed as false information per Natalie. Thank you, Natalie.

Comments

B, those are parameters, not sort keys.