We need a different approach for maintaining and specifying sort order.
It could be moved to separate extension, which is sort of WMF specific, and store the few default orders in a system message and have a place where wikis can define a custom order.
There is a patch to handle some aspects of sorting in core, and should revisit that also.
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/24211/
Sorting the links really is *not* wikibase specific and the sort orders do not belong there.
Note there are rather detailed configurations that pywikipedia uses to maintain all this.
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/pywikipedia/trunk/pywikipedia/families/wikipedia_family.py?view=log
Note that pywikipedia also uses these MediaWiki system messages which are maintained globally on meta wiki.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Interwiki_config-sorting_order-native-languagename
Obviously that's not an ideal place for us to have them, but they need to be somewhere that allows the community to help maintain it while gerrit seems to suck too much for that, apparently.
just for future reference: (alphabetic_sr was removed from pywikibot because the sorting is handled by Wikidata, and the putfirst config in pywikibot was removed):