What's happening:
If you add {{DEFAULTSORT:foo}} to a page, the timestamp for when the category was added updates for all categories on the page

What's I thought would happen:
The timestamp only changes with the addition (or deletion and re-addition) of a category

Why I think that way/why this is a problem:
The timestamp to when the category is added is used by the DPL's on wikinews to determine what articles to display as the "latest news". Somebody recently noticed some older articles were not sorted properly (aka they started with a quote or something). Thus {{DEFAULTSORT:article name sans beginning punctuation}} was added. However, we did not want the articles from a couple months ago to be back on the top of the latest news list.

Example:
[[n:"Darfur a powder keg" says UN Head of Humanitarian Affairs]] was recently edited to add an unrelated category, and a {{DEFAULTSORT:}}key. ( http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=%22Darfur_a_powder_keg%22_says_UN_Head_of_Humanitarian_Affairs&diff=722990&oldid=633194 ) Now the article is on the top of the latest news DPLs, despite the last edit that should affect the publish category's add date was in May. According to the api ( http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=%22Darfur_a_powder_keg%22_says_UN_Head_of_Humanitarian_Affairs&diff=722990&oldid=633194 ) all the category timestamps were updated when the sortkey was changed. I don't think they should have been.

-Cheers,
Bawolff

Version: 1.13.x
Severity: normal
URL: http://en.wikinews.org/w/api.php?action=query&clprop=timestamp&titles=%22Darfur%20a%20powder%20keg%22%20says%20UN%20Head%20of%20Humanitarian%20Affairs&prop=categories