(sorry for cross-posting ...)
Hello all,
we're really happy to announce that the new AdvancedSearch interface got deployed as a beta feature to Mediawiki.org and test just 2 hours ago. [1]
AdvancedSearch enhances Special:Search through an advanced parameters form and aims to
make existing search options more visible and accessible for everyone. [2]
The feature is a project by WMDE's Tech team and originates from the Technical Wishes project. Many other people and teams helped making this project happen, so stay tuned for the thank you section at the end of this email :-) [3]
Why AdvancedSearch
The Search has great options to perform advanced queries, but often even experienced editors don't know about it - this is what we found out when we were conducting a workshop series on advanced search in several cities in Germany in 2016. Together with contributors from German Wikipedia we've discussed their desired search queries, explained how the syntax works and how keywords like "hastemplate", "filetype" or "intitle" can be used and combined to get the desired results.
The idea for the AdvancedSearch feature results out of these workshops, where we not only discussed search but also designed first mocks for an advanced search interface. [4]
The first version, more deployments and other next steps
AdvancedSearch supports some of the special search options the
WMF's search team has been implemented in the last
years. The way the interface works, users don't have to know the syntax behind each search field, but they can learn about it if they want to. The first version of the feature comes with a first selection of advanced search options, e.g. including support for "hastemplate" or "intitle". The WMF's search team has started to work on a 'deepcat' functionality to make sub category search happen. We plan to add support for this in the future, too.
If all goes well, we plan to deploy the beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia by Wednesday, Nov 29. [5]
In the next 2-3 months we'd love to invite everyone to test the new feature on those wikis: Comments, thoughs, bug reports ... - any feedback is much appreciated!
Thank you (finally!)
This project was developed with the support from many different people from the start, and this makes it very special to us: We would like to thank the folks from the German Wikipedia community who participated in the workshops and who were discussing and designing first ideas together with us. We would like to thank all other people who gave valuable feedback on Phabricator, onwiki and in real life. We would like to thank the Arabic Wikipedia community for getting interested in AdvancedSearch, and for offering to test this feature in an early stage. The credit for the development work on AdvancedSearch goes to our FUN team, supported by the team that usually works on Technical Wishes. Last but really not least we would like to thank the great folks from the WMF's search team who have supported this project from the start and who have done (and still do) the necessary backend work that now got supported by the AdvancedSearch extension.
Sorry for the long email, and thanks for reading :-)
Birgit (for the Technical Wishes team)