Cross-posting from wikitech-l. Please discuss this there. :-)

Dan

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org Date: 17 December 2015 at 17:09 Subject: New Beta Feature: completion suggester To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Hey all,

In the continued quest to make the search bar a better tool, the Wikimedia Foundation's Discovery Department https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery has put a completion suggester into Beta Features. The tool functions with search-as-you-type, with a small tolerance for typos and spacing in finding results. Possible matches are then displayed as you type in a drop down menu, hopefully eliminating the need to perform a fulltext search with landing page and all. You can read more details at mediawiki.org https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CirrusSearch/CompletionSuggester and use the talk page for now for feedback.

The tool is now available and will only be enabled for the article namespace for now, and will progress into full production at some point hopefully in early 2016, depending on feedback. It's going to be important to get feedback from regular contributors who use search to make sure that any of the basic feature requests for searching the main space can at least be addressed while in Beta Features.

Thanks!

Dan

-- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation