Add option to insert category before current category in Cat-a-lot
Problem: Suppose you are browsing a certain category on Wikimedia Commons. Using Cat-a-lot, you decide to pick a couple of files and add another category to them. The new category will be automatically added next to the category you are browsing. But you might wish that the new category will be inserted before the category you are currently browsing, instead of after it, if you think the order of categories of files important. Currently, Cat-a-lot doesn't allow you to do this.
Proposed solution: Make it possible for a user to choose that a new category be inserted either before or after the current category.
I think the people who benefit from this idea is not only the Commons users, but also some users who use Cat-a-lot on other wikis. However, the order of categories is sometimes important for big-small category. Thingofme (talk) 00:51, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Today I learned categories are actually displayed in the order they appear on the page, so this proposal has an actual purpose. I was sure categories are sorted alphabetically in the parser output. ToBeFree (talk) 06:22, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It would be nice if categories displayed in alphabetical order. It saves time when checking if a page is in a specific category, or in each of a set of categories. It would also be nice if a category editing tool collected and sorted the categories in the wikitext automatically when used. Also useful on Wikipedias · · · Peter (Southwood)(talk): 07:43, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
en:User:Alex_21/script-categoriessort is "a script that sorts categories in an article alphabetically." It makes an edit and saves the changes to the live article. Apparently it's contentious whether cats should be alphabetized vs organized in other ways. But it seems like it wouldn't be hard to write a .js that simply operated on the display (reader-level) rather than changing the article source itself for those who wanted it. DMacks (talk) 10:45, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The order of categories is VERY contentious within the WP projects. In German WP, biographies are categorized by "field of profession", "all other categories", "birth by...", "death by...", "gender", just for example. Contrary, on Commons I don't think there is any preferred order - instead we are glad if correct categories exist at all. --Enyavar (talk) 12:04, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Additionally, some scripts/bots are definitely re-ordering them alphabetically along with other non-cosmetic changes – changing the behaviour within Cat-a-lot would be contrary to this apparently non-controversial kind of generic cleanup. ~~~~ User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)22:17, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You haven't explained why you think the order in which the categories are displayed is important, or why it would be useful to have some subjective ordering of categories. Since categories are basically a poor man's ontology (unlike proper ontologies like Wikidata is becoming), and a category simply denotes a class of an instance, specifying subjective category orderings makes no sense, in general. I suppose I might support the ability if it only applied to the user, i.e. if a particular user wants categories on a page to be displayed in a particular arbitrary order for them, so be it. But having some global subjective category ordering is undefined and meaningless. Silver hr (talk) 17:35, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support In Wiktionaries, as pages displayed a content about several languages, the order of categories do matters. Noé (talk) 00:25, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Precious time of the Community Tech can be spend better on other projects. The order of (parent) categories in a file, category or other page is of no importance. --JopkeB (talk) 04:37, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support I support, because this is a good user interface issue. Many people think, intuitively, that right position = subcat. Others don't. So why not let them put new cat whichever side it means to them? G41rn8 (talk) 23:25, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support — Draceane talkcontrib. 22:59, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
Oppose Precious time of the Community Tech can be spend better on other projects. The order of (parent) categories in a file, category or other page is of no importance. --JopkeB (talk) 04:37, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
