Hello,
I think most users mainly want to search on article titles, not on
full text. Maybe that should be the default behavior of the search box
(changeable in preferences?).
Then there should be an "Advanced
search" page where you can do full text search with regular expressions
and all the fixings. This would be used by authors, but users could
also see a link to this page on their list of returned search results.
I think search results would become more relevant and searching would
become quicker.
Alternatively, one could modify the presentation of search results so
that those articles whose title matches the search string are listed
first, followed by the article body matches.
Also, I don't think it helps to have subpages listed as indented.
Indentation suggests one of two things: the indented entries are not
as important as the others, or they belong together into some group,
neither of which applies to the search results. I think it would be
easier to scan the search results if all results would be indented
except for the first one of every letter, like this:
Axiom
Arian nation
Austria
Denmark
Fishing
Farming
Finch
Zoloft
Cheers,
Axel
I think users most of the time want to search on article titles only.
That should be the default behavior of the little search boxes on
every page (maybe changeable on user preferences page?).
Then there should be an advanced search page where you can search on
article body, with regular expression and all the fixings. Authors
will use this.
If you do a regular article title search, the page with returned
results should say: "You can also do a [[full text search]] of all
articles."
Alternatively, search could remain full text as it is now, but return
the pages with the search term in their title above, and separated
from, the ones with the search term in their body.
Cheers,
Axel
Could the search option be changed so that it gives the pages linking to
a certain page, rather than the pages containing a certain phrase? As things
are now, a page with "... is an actor who always wears panama hats" (or
even "The panamarican highway" will show up in a search for Panama, but
"... the [[Panama|Panamese]] prime minister..." will not. I think such a
search could also be made faster than the current one.
--
Andre Engels, engels(a)win.tue.nl
Telephone: +31(0)6-11181398 (GSM)
http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/index_en.html
PGP Public key: see http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/pgp.asc
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise,
we don't believe in it at all -- Noam Chomsky
>> I'm getting editing locks on everything right now too.
>
>Just a quick reminder: *anyone* can clear the editing lock by
>visiting this URL:
>
>http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=unlock
>
etc.
Ok, thanks.
A question: I mentioned in the feature requests that a search for
"John MacDonald" will not turn up "John A. MacDonald" or "John D
MacDonald". So I tried to search for _ , with the purpose of changing
them back to spaces so that those terms will turn up in searches. But
that search returned 6055 pages, which is a problem in itself, but the
one :-) that I checked did not contain an underscore at all. Is there
some way to perform this search accurately?0
My apologies if this is redundant, I don't follow this mailing list.
As of the moment of my typing, addresses of the form:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo
give a 404 error. Since every link in ths system is of this form, that
means things are broken. :-(
However, address of the form
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki.cgi?Foo
work.
Has there been a recent httpd rules change ?
Thanks,
-- Pat
--
This message does not represent the policies or positions
of the Mayo Foundation or its subsidiaries.
Patrick Spinler email: Spinler.Patrick(a)Mayo.EDU
Mayo Foundation phone: 507/284-9485