The Signpost

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Proposed changes to category sorting

Last week saw a significant discussion on the wikitech-l technology mailing list about the future of category sorting. The discussion was prompted by Aryeh Gregor (User:Simetrical) announcing that he would be working on the area. Among the outstanding bug requests being targeted was the ability to paginate sub-categories, pages and files separately. Of particular interest to non-English wikis is the development of a system to allow custom category sort-orders, instead of relying on the Unicode specification. For example, this would allow the sorting of "é" straight after "e" in languages that use such a diacritic, rather than at the end of the alphabet as at present. Discussion on how best to fix these bugs is ongoing.

Multimedia upload wizard: preliminary test results promising

Highlights from the testing of the current upload interface: user consternation!

As User:TheDJ wrote, last week Guillaume Paumier (User:Guillom) of the Wikimedia Multimedia Usability team published some results on his blog from the first testing done of the usability of the Wikimedia Commons upload process, and the first prototype for the new upload wizard currently under development. Paumier noted of the tests:

He added, "we don't want to make a lot of publicity about our prototype yet. If you happen to know about it and you want to share your opinion, that's fine. But we'll officially invite the community later to try it out."

In brief

Note: not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.


















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