DEFAULTSORT - Sort Order

Sort Order

By default, a page is sorted under the first letter of its full name including the namespace. Also, MediaWiki groups accented characters separately from their unaccented version, so pages starting by À, Á, Ä, will be listed under separate headings, instead of under heading A.

Unlike at Special:Allpages and Special:Prefixindex, a space is treated as a space (coming before all other characters), not as an underscore.

Each of the three lists (subcategories, pages, media files) is arranged in the order explained above (except that, in the subcategories list, the namespace indicator "Category:" is not considered). If an item ought to be positioned within a list on the basis of an alternative name (sort key) for that item, then this can be specified in the category tag that places the item in the list:

For example to add an article called Albert Einstein to the category "People" and have the article sorted by "Einstein, Albert", you would type:

Unlike with a piped link (which uses the same syntax), the sort key itself is not displayed to readers. It affects only the order in which pages are listed on the category page.

It is useful to document the system being used for sort keys on the category page. For guidelines about the use of sort keys on Wikipedia, see WP:SORTKEY.