User talk:Djiboun/sorted table

James 10:45, 2 October 2010 (UTC): Djiboun, thanks for creating this, however I am fairly sure it is not going to fly. The most important problem is that we need the classification into categories. In the past we have had many visitors add the 'same' requests in different places, which is a real mess to clean up. They also don't get to see the section specific advice. In principle we could solve that by a third column with a category in it which would be sortable too. However, we'd need to use/add section numbers to get the order that we want. The second problem is that wikipedia sortable lists only work for small tables. Once you have more than about 200 rows they no longer get sorted.
 * Gale 03 Sep 10: There are other extensions listed that appear to have sortable tables but without trying them there may be similar roadblocks (I could still sort Djiboun's page after I extended it to 250 rows, but after extending it further, Preview would give a blank page). I think this is probably insoluble without sending users elsewhere to an online spreadsheet with separate registration, or implementing something on our main web site. We are in bug fix (not innovation) mode at the moment, so there isn't any priority to make changes. Also current de facto policy is not to "advertise" the existence of Wiki Feature Requests as much as we used to. Rather we thrash requests out on the Forum (or by e-mail with people who write to feedback@) and then one of us will update the Wiki. The rationale is that the page ultimately takes less time to maintain that way because time isn't spent shortening/moving/amalgamating votes and comments. Personally I don't think it crucially important if categories are lost when sorting by vote. While users may be interested to know what's voted for most, I think it's more useful to us than to users. There may even be an argument that being able to see the most popular requests biases votes towards them. One possible solution may be simply to duplicate the current page, sort it by votes then maintain it as a separate locked page. Once sorted, I would not find it that much work to add the vote/comment there as well as on the open access page. Maybe the category an item is in could be a link back to the main page if this is felt important. I also think retaining the current page in non-tabular format might make it easier for users to add comments rather than simply "vote".