I would also appreciate this feature, and humbly request that this feature be bumped higher in priority. Thank you!

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2024-06-17T20:06:59Z] <jforrester@deploy1002> jforrester: Backport for [[gerrit:1041659|[wikifunctionswiki] Remove right to promote/demote sysops and bureaucrats from staff (T365627)]], [[gerrit:1039767|Add a note that you cannot change wgCategoryCollation easily (T362494 T366809)]] synced to the testservers (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug)

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2024-06-17T20:01:57Z] <jforrester@deploy1002> Started scap: Backport for [[gerrit:1041659|[wikifunctionswiki] Remove right to promote/demote sysops and bureaucrats from staff (T365627)]], [[gerrit:1039767|Add a note that you cannot change wgCategoryCollation easily (T362494 T366809)]]

Change #1039767 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Add a note that you cannot change wgCategoryCollation easily

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1039767

There may be some pages that are wrong, but this should sort itself out as they're re-parsed.

Pagination appears to be working correctly now.

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2024-06-06T15:23:02Z] <jforrester@deploy1002> Finished scap: Backport for [[gerrit:1039746|Revert "commonswiki: Enable numeric wgCategoryCollation" (T366809)]] (duration: 13m 58s)

Change #1039767 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jforrester; author: Jforrester):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Add a note that you cannot change wgCategoryCollation easily

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1039767

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2024-06-06T15:11:34Z] <jforrester@deploy1002> jforrester: Backport for [[gerrit:1039746|Revert "commonswiki: Enable numeric wgCategoryCollation" (T366809)]] synced to the testservers (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug)

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2024-06-06T15:09:03Z] <jforrester@deploy1002> Started scap: Backport for [[gerrit:1039746|Revert "commonswiki: Enable numeric wgCategoryCollation" (T366809)]]

Change #1039746 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Revert "commonswiki: Enable numeric wgCategoryCollation"

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1039746

Change #1039746 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jforrester; author: Jforrester):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Revert "commonswiki: Enable numeric wgCategoryCollation"

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1039746

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2024-06-03T12:03:18Z] <ladsgroup@deploy1002> Finished scap: Backport for [[gerrit:1037942|Enable numeric sorting for Persian (T329440)]] (duration: 12m 07s)

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2024-06-03T11:53:30Z] <ladsgroup@deploy1002> ebrahim and ladsgroup: Backport for [[gerrit:1037942|Enable numeric sorting for Persian (T329440)]] synced to the testservers (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug)

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2024-06-03T11:51:11Z] <ladsgroup@deploy1002> Started scap: Backport for [[gerrit:1037942|Enable numeric sorting for Persian (T329440)]]

Change #1037942 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Enable numeric sorting for Persian

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1037942

Change #1037942 had a related patch set uploaded (by Ebrahim; author: Ebrahim):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Enable numeric sorting for Persian

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1037942

Change #1037940 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] beta: Enable numeric sorting for Persian

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1037940

Change #1037940 had a related patch set uploaded (by Ebrahim; author: Ebrahim):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Enable numeric sorting for Persian in labs

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1037940

Invalid - was due to an errant template.

Questions from @Bmueller:

• What are the dependencies (code, and/or people)?
  • "Categories" are a fairly small feature. It builds on general platform concepts like JobQueue, DeferredUpdates, and utility functions, but I don't think this task requires changes to other components or feature behaviours. As such, while not exactly standalone, I'd say it has no code dependencies that we need to be mindful of in this context. In terms of teams, the feature is unowned. The task does not require making behaviour changes besides obvious bug fixes, so no controversial decisions or indirect product impact expected there.
• What is the impact of this?
  • Sustainability: the current implementation is needlessly complex and redundant and yet still seeems to regularly produce inaccurate counts. It is prune to production errors and load problems. e.g. T352628: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBTransactionSizeError", per @Ladsgroup above.
  • Product experience: The most prominent use category counts, where the number itself is imporant/sensitive, is Wikipedia maintenance categories, and similar "meta" categories on other wikis. The counts are often used to power templates, gadgets, and bots to know when a particular kind of issue has more than 0 articles affecting it. The problem is often that the category will either be zero when it shouldn't be or above zero when it should be zero. To clarify: The problem is not e.g. when a category containing 100+ items and the number being off by a few, which would not be a big problem in that case. We have ~15 duplicate bug reports about this at the moment, dating back several years.
• What would it cost to fix? TBD.