Forum:Table Dates

On this page I’m tying to sort them by the year they were born https://oversimplified.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_OverSimplified_characters. I added the sort by date and it works but there is one problem:

If the date is 551 BC it should got before the date 134 because it’s chronological order. On the table they put 134 before the year 551 BC. I was reading the help:sorting bit. Does it only work for non BC dates? I tried adding a minus sign but that just ruined the table. Is there any way like a symbol or letter to make 551 BC go to the top of the table when the birth year is clicked? Sahaib3005 (talk) 13:17, December 24, 2020 (UTC)

Hello, anyone there? Sahaib3005 (talk) 17:09, December 24, 2020 (UTC)

Andrewds1021 (talk) 21:39, January 3, 2021 (UTC)
 * Next time, please be sure to either use the proper form or add the proper header yourself. Otherwise, no one will see your question and thus you won't receive and answer. That is what happened this time. The issue is that the sorting feature treats all values as strings. It doesn't know that it is sorting dates. I see you already "fixed" the issue by representing BC dates as negative dates. This is essentially what you have to do. However, if you still want them to display as "551 BC" instead of "-551", there are two things you can do. You could test it to see if sorting the values as dates will work or you can simply set "-551" as the cell sortkey and have "551 BC" as the cell contents. Please see this page for more information.