Hey Stas,
Thanks for digging into this and writing it down!
Would there be any drawback with the following steps as way forward
and possibility to learn more as we go?
1. We return results for the Lexeme namespace only when people
explicitly select it
2. We get feedback
3. We go the "Best possible query" route when people select all namespaces
4. We get feedback
5. We go the "Best possible query" route for all searches if feedback
indicates this is useful (I don't know at this point)
Cheers
Lydia
On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 2:26 AM Stas Malyshev <smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi!
While working on fulltext search for Lexemes, I have encountered a
question which I think needs to be discussed and resolved. The question
is how fulltext search should be working when dealing with different
content models and what search should do by default and in specialized
cases.
The main challenge in Wikidata is that we are dealing with substantially
different content models - articles, Items (including Properties,
because while being formally different type, they are similar enough to
Items for search to ignore the difference) and Lexemes organize their
data in a different way, and should be searched using different
specialized queries. This is currently unique for Wikidata, but SDC
might eventually have the same challenge to deal with. I've described
challenges and questions there are here in more detail:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Smalyshev_(WMF)/Wikidata_search#Fulltext…
I'd like to first hear some feedback about what are the expectations
about the combined search are - what is expected to work, how it is
expected to work, what are the defaults, what are the use cases for
these. I have outlined some solutions that were proposed on wiki, if you
have any comments please feel welcome to respond either here or on wiki.
TLDR version of it is that doing search on different data models is
hard, and we would need to sacrifice something to make it work. We need
to figure out and decide which of these sacrifices are acceptable and
what is enabled/disabled by default.
Thanks,
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org
--
Lydia Pintscher -
http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
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