Hi Everyone,
As discussed in more detail in Phabricator ticket T228925
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T228925>, it turns out that parentheses
and the boolean operators AND and OR do not actually work as advertised in
the documentation. The short term plan is to update the documentation to
reflect current reality, and the long term plan is to fix reality to
reflect the currently aspirational documentation.
Here's the first draft of the update to go in the Help:Searching Logical
operators <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching#Logical_operators>
section:
> The search engine supports *limited* boolean logic in searches. Logical
> NOT (negation) can be indicated by a "-" (minus sign) or a "!"
> (exclamation point) character prefixed to a search term, or by the NOT
> keyword.
>
Parentheses (…) are ignored by the search engine and have no effect.
>
The operators AND and OR are used by the search engine, but *do not have
> the expected boolean logical meaning* and should be used with great care.
> See the additional documentation
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Drafts/Logical_operators_i…>
> for an in-depth explanation.
I've also written a draft of the longer explanation (~1200 words) of the
use of Logical operators in on-wiki search
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Drafts/Logical_operators_i…>
. *Feedback is much appreciated!*
I still need to review the rest of the Help:Searching page and
mw:Help:CirrusSearch page to see if any other changes are needed there.
Thanks,
—Trey
Trey Jones
Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
UTC-4 / EDT