Can the sort order for diacritics be changed?

Question

WikiTree appears to be using some sort of Scandinavian version of sort order (alphabetization): it puts letters with diacritics at the end, after Z.

In Hungarian, German, all of the Slavic languages written in Latin letters, Romanian, Spanish, and French, at the very least, this is Wrong-with-a-capital-W. All of these languages use some variant of filing diacritics either with the "base" letter or immediately after it. (See Wikipedia under Alphabetical Order.)

Is there any chance of a global change to "treat the diacritic just like the base letter"? This would not be perfectly correct for most languages, but it would be a whole lot less wrong than the current setup.

Failing that, is there wiki markup "magic" that could be applied to specific category pages to make things sort more-correctly there (now and in the future when new things are added to the category)?

Answer 1

Would this not be language specific, depending on whether there is a new letter created in its own right? For example, in Norwegian the letters æ, ø and å are the last three letters in the alphabet.

Comments

As I wrote in my question, yes, it's language-specific, and no two languages do it exactly alike. However, filing modified characters at the end of the alphabet is not the most common solution. Filing them as if they were unmodified is much closer to the solutions adopted by most languages that use Latin letters with diacritics.

Letters like ð and þ -- additions to, rather than modifications of, the Latin alphabet -- generally have traditional Latin-letter equivalents (dh and th, respectively) that can be used for determining their sort order.

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I understand your issue, but it would still have to be resolved in a way that does not create new problems for those alphabets where sorting by the Latin equivalent would be incorrect.

Answer 2

I don't think that the sorting is according to "wiki markup"The sorting is probably as specified by PHP, which sorts according to some ISO standard since this is the base language. You could change the sorting to anything you like in PHP but to get sorting changed on WikiTree would not be a simple matter because the MediaWiki part runs on top of PHP with predetermined lists.

Sorry I can't be more specific, if you labelled your request tech, then maybe you would have gotten a better reply from them.

Comments

(just a quick note, you don't need to use the "tech" tag if you use the "WikiTree Tech" category) :-)

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Abby, does that mean "tech" is like a key tag for the "WikiTree Tech" category. If I follow it , I will get notified about all posts in "WikiTree Tech" category?

So what is the key tags for the other categories?

PS My apologies to J Anonymous for hi-jacking his topic like this!
 

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No, we just don't want to use tech as a tag- it is redundant since going to the G2G category will give you Tech posts. Unfortunately, you cannot follow a category. Most of us just check the categories regularly (daily most of the time).

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I can see your point if you just check the categories each day.but....

In order for the post to show in my feed it will need to be tagged "tech". Thus by not tagging the post it will not show up in my feed. This practice explains why I don't see the tech posts in my feed.

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Just as a point of interest, there is a word for people who advocate one policy but in practice they do something else. We are encouraged to follow tags by WikiTree. I made a descission to follow "tech" because it is currently the 18th highest ranked tag with 901 posts. Now I find it is supposed to be redundant.

They are called politicians.☺