Am Montag, den 11.08.2008, 23:04 +1000 schrieb Stephen Bain:
On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Simon Lehmann simon.lehmann@gmx.de wrote:
I am wondering if the search module should return pages that don't exist. If I am searching for something, I probably want to find something that already exists, especially if I use srwhat=text. I don't even know where the API gets the text to search in, for a page that doesn't even exist.
Just look at the example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=query&gsrsearch=... %20not%20exist&generator=search&gsrnamespace=0
The first few in the results there have been deleted. No "pageid" attribute and the presence of the "missing" attribute indicates a deleted page. The question of whether such entries should be returned by default, as seems to follow from your observation, is still open, but the software didn't make this up, it's just from a deleted revision.
I am not quite sure if "no id and missing" is indicating a deleted page. If I send a query with a title that never existed it also returns a page without an id and is marked as missing, so it can't be distinguished from a deleted page (or vice versa).
But my point was, as you have already said, that by default it shouldn't return missing pages at all, no matter if they never have existed or don't exist anymore. It would be good to have an option which toggles the inclusion of deleted or even missing pages. The latter would obviously only make sense with a title-search.
Besides that, it also seems to find stuff that doesn't even belong into the main namespace, even if it existed, like:
...
The ones that look like user talk pages had been moved, and the move destination was misspelled ("User taIk", with a capital I instead of a lowercase l - you may need a serif font to see the difference). If the software doesn't recognise the namespace, then it treats it as if there is simply a colon in the title and puts it in the mainspace.
Now that you mention it, I can see that too.
Simon Lehmann