On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 2:03 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Would it be possible, and if so would it be desirable, to provide links to wiktionary for single-word searches? That might be a way to provide content in the user's current language, when it isn't available on the current wikipedia.

Desirable is a philosophical question, but it seems reasonable to me. Possible certainly seems possible, if it helps. Once again, what we really need to do is look through the data and see how often something that looks like this comes up.

A few more ideas to toss on the pile, some of which have potential philosophical implications. (Thanks to Moiz for inspiring these during a recent chat.)

- "trending typos"—here's the philosophical bit—do we want/need to solve all zero searches with improved search engine results, or are redirects acceptable? If they are, we could publish a list of the top zero-results searches and allow human editors to fix the ones that are obvious typos with redirects. Célia Šašić comes to mind again. One announcer repeatedly said her name like it was "Celia Sausage". I don't know if any generic search engine technique is going to take care of that. If it was the top zero-results query, though, a redirect from Celia Sausage to Célia Šašić would be helpful.

Even if we don't like redirects, we could also try to map (possibly via more computationally expensive techniques, permanently or temporarily) the top-N most common zero-results queries to the top-P most common queries (across search sessions)—similar to mapping typos to corrected typos (within a search session). This would allow us to catch trending topics that are hard to spell.

—Trey