DEFAULTSORT has to come above the category.

Okay, let me clean up my notes from IRC last night when I was half asleep and on my mobile device which isn't very useful for editing...

I would expect:
{{DEFAULTSORT: stuff |noreplace}}
with the "noreplace" argument/parameter to lock that default sort in for the rest of the page, regardless if I had it in the right place for that category I wanted to use it on. As a side note, it actually was using the defaultsort after the category for the ones that didn't have conflicting defaultsort declarations elsewhere on the page.

However, all of the "Joe Smith" drafts in the category http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:G13_eligible_AfC_submissions that also had a {{defaultsort:Smith, Joe}} on the page were returning an error such as 'Warning: Default sort key "Zelenoff, Charlie" overrides earlier default sort key "148"'

I would expect the "|noreplace}}" to prevent that based on the description (It can take a second argument of noerror or noreplace to suppress error messages when multiple defaultsortkeys are used on one page or to make it do nothing if multiple defaultsortkeys are used.) at the www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words#DEFAULTSORT page.

(In reply to comment #2)

I would expect:
{{DEFAULTSORT: stuff |noreplace}}
with the "noreplace" argument/parameter to lock that default sort in for the
rest of the page, regardless if I had it in the right place for that
category I
wanted to use it on. As a side note, it actually was using the defaultsort
after the category for the ones that didn't have conflicting defaultsort
declarations elsewhere on the page.

Umm, noreplace does the opposite. {{defaultsort:foo|noreplace}} means use default sort of 'foo', but if there was already a default sort specified, do not replace it.

I don't think we should be able to override sorts specified on the category tag. More specific things should take precedence.

To be explicit: I think this bug should be closed wontfix, but am open to being convinced otherwise.