MediaWiki 1.17/Category sorting

The MediaWiki 1.17 release contains a number of fixes related to how categories are sorted:

• (bug 164) Support for locale-specific category sorting. In English, this means lowercase and uppercase letters will sort the same.
• (bug 1211) Subcategories, ordinary pages, and files now page separately.
• When several pages are given the same sort key, they sort by their names instead of randomly.

Initially, the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) is implemented for all languages. However, this set of changes paves the way for locale-specific encoding.

More technical details about this set of improvements can be found in the wikitech-l thread "Architectural revisions to improve category sorting"