Hello,
I agree that the search interface deserves some reconditioning.
The search interface is the first entry point for many users. Thus, it needs to be designed as simple as possible. I guess my grandma would be completely overextended by the current one with its dozens of options.
I propose to completely forget thinking about namespaces. The vast majority of users doesn't even know what namespaces are. The typical user comes to Wikipedia and hits the search button, because he's just interested in ns 0, so ns 0 should be the default.
On the other hand, some users, mostly our contributors, need other search options. Although they have an understanding about namespaces, they visit the search interface with the intention to find something either on a talk page, an image description page, a project page or something similar. Most of them do not intend to search the talk namespace, the image namespace, or the Wikipedia namespace. It's the search interface that forces people to transform their search destinations into namespace names.
I admit that namespace names are quite self-explanatory, so we don't have a serious problem here. Though, a good user interface doesn't force users into an unnatural way of thinking. Namespaces are MediaWikis technical way to devide pages up, they are not the way how ordinary people think. The appropriate way of handling this would of course be MediaWiki internally mapping common search options to predefined sets of namespaces.
In conclusion, we should have a search interface containing three basic elements: - a big search box -- Google has a simple front page with a centralised search box for a reason - some common options, like those proposed by FT2:
On 31.10.2008 13:13:13, FT2 wrote:
- Articles
- Articles and article discussion
- Articles, discussion, project space, and project talk
- Project and project talk spaces
- Images, categories, templates and their talk pages
- All namespaces
- Custom
- and finally a "Go" button.
Leon