I know that the WS community has some long-awaited phabricator requests for search improvements.

An example relates to search, subpages and typeahead that impact upon our compilation works .

As background, as the WSes reproduce PD works where the components of a work will be subpages -- that can be biographical or an article in a journal.

Search and typeahead are currently designed (packaged?) for the predominant component of the lead name of the work.  So that works well for Encyclopaedia Britannica, but is a lot less useful for 'shakespeare' for each biographical work within each encyclopaedia.

Typeahead is especially limited where content pages are in multiple namespaces and/or where subpages are utilised.

Prior to improving interwiki, fixing up intrawiki would be a good first step.

Billinghurst


On Fri, 6 Nov 2015 08:56 Erik Bernhardson <ebernhardson@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I happened to be looking at the proposed Q3 goals yesterday, currently they say:

  • Make www.wikipedia.org a portal for exploring open content on Wikimedia sites.
  • Bring more consistency to the user experience for search across desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps.
  • Enhance search results and expose users to other interesting content by improving interwiki search integration.
My concern is that our current user satisfaction metric suggests 15% of users are happy with the results they are getting. This is really bad. I would prefer to see us focus on search relevance and improving the scoring of what we already have before spending more focus on interwiki search. I don't have anything to point to yet, but for search satisfaction to be so low I don't think that's because we arn't surfacing content from other wiki's, I think its because when you search for something we surface all kinds of results that aren't nearly as relevant as other data we have in the corpus.

I really want to see us focus on fixing what we already have and validating the features we already support before we go whole hog on incorperating all kinds of new data.

Erik B.
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