As an editor, I would like a way to force a wikitable to sort itself by a specific column upon rendering. This is not currently possible, cf:
It is not possible to make a table appear sorted by a certain column without the user clicking on it. By default, the rows of a table always appear in the same order as in the wikitext. If you want a table to appear sorted by a certain column, you must sort the wikitext itself in that order - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Sorting#Default_order
Two good example use-cases:
- For wikitables where multiple fields change regularly/annually. These updates often necessitate resorting the wikitext itself, which can be very time-consuming (even if following the workaround described at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Sorting#Sorting_the_wikitext_of_a_table ).
- For wikitables where the raw wikitext in a column is already sorted in ascending order, then a user who clicks on a heading will see no affect the first time. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teams_and_cyclists_in_the_2015_Giro_d'Italia#By_starting_number
This feature request was recently mentioned here, but I've seen it requested many times before, e.g.