The external identifiers section on item pages should order the properties alphabetically by default.

Currently, by default, properties are displayed in the order they were first added to the item. This leads to inconsistent ordering between pages.

MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties was added so that wikis can manually customise the order, but the default order was not changed. This means that every property must be added to MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties to have a consistent order between pages.

If there are a lot of properties, the page becomes very large and hard to maintain. On Wikidata, people are having to use a script to update it (link). Editing the page causes my browser to grind to a halt, which means I don't/can't fulfil as many edit requests as I might do otherwise.

The largest section of the list is the one with over 7800 external IDs, ordered alphabetically by their English label (link). This accounts for 70% of all the properties on this page. If external ID properties had a sensible default order, this section would not be necessary.

Using MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties to order properties by their English label also means the order only works for English. If ordering by label were done by Wikibase instead, it would work for other languages too.