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S Page

17 Jun 2013 17 Jun '13

8:28 p.m.

...

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/CirrusSearch

This made me realize I have a poor sense of the features in search, so I read the documentation. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Searching is bare-bones, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching disagrees. Perhaps the former describes the default MediaWiki search features, while WMF has enabled more and different features on its wikis (such as intitle: and incategory: searches). * mw help doesn't mention the * suffix to search for partial matches, or the ~ prefix. Both work on my unmodified local wiki. * enwiki says "Hello dolly" in quotes gives different results, mw directly contradicts this. Even on my local wiki, quotes make a difference. * enwiki disagrees with itself what a dash in front of a word does. I fixed mw search's explanation of the two-button search box (no longer the default) but I don't know the details on the above. -- =S Page software engineer on Editor Engagement Experiments

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Chris McMahon

17 Jun 17 Jun

8:33 p.m.

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:28 PM, S Page <spage(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

* enwiki says "Hello dolly" in quotes gives different results, mw directly contradicts this. Even on my local wiki, quotes make a difference. * enwiki disagrees with itself what a dash in front of a word does.

Nikolas Everett

10:59 p.m.

I'm not sure about http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Searching but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching has lots of things we're going to have to add to our list. My guess is http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Searching is simply out of date. Nik On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 4:33 PM, Chris McMahon <cmcmahon(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

...

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:28 PM, S Page <spage(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

* enwiki says "Hello dolly" in quotes gives different results, mw

directly

contradicts this. Even on my local wiki, quotes make a difference. * enwiki disagrees with itself what a dash in front of a word does.

I did some research a few weeks ago on the current state of Search and there are a number of discrepancies between the documentation and actual behavior. Some of them have BZ tickets, like https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44238 -Chris _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Brian Wolff

18 Jun 18 Jun

12:23 a.m.

Just as a note, MediaWiki default (aka "crappy") search is very different from the lucene stuff used by Wikimedia. Lucene search is rather difficult to set up, so most third party wikis do not use it. --bawolff On 6/17/13, Nikolas Everett <neverett(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:28 PM, S Page <spage(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

* enwiki says "Hello dolly" in quotes gives different results, mw

directly

contradicts this. Even on my local wiki, quotes make a difference. * enwiki disagrees with itself what a dash in front of a word does.

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Nikolas Everett

12:40 a.m.

One of our goals while building this has been to make something reasonably easy to install by folks outside of WMF. I've added some notes about this to the page. I'd certainly love to hear ways that'd make it simpler to use. Nik On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 8:23 PM, Brian Wolff <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

I'm not sure about http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Searching but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching has lots of things we're

going

to have to add to our list. My guess is http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Searching is simply out of date. Nik On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 4:33 PM, Chris McMahon <cmcmahon(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:28 PM, S Page <spage(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

> * enwiki says "Hello dolly" in quotes gives different results, mw

directly

contradicts this. Even on my local wiki, quotes make a difference. * enwiki disagrees with itself what a dash in front of a word does.

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Eran Rosenthal

5:14 a.m.

I think that from user perspective, such help pages are not very useful since most users don't read help pages. Some features (the important ones) should be hinted in the search form itself. In hewiki we modified the [[MediaWiki:Search-summary]][1] to include a small expandable table with hints for features (intitle/incategory e.g). Eran [1] http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%93%D7%99%D7%94_%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A7%D7… On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 3:40 AM, Nikolas Everett <neverett(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

...

I'm not sure about http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Searching but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching has lots of things we're

going > to have to add to our list. My guess is > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Searching is simply out of date. > > Nik > > > On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 4:33 PM, Chris McMahon > <cmcmahon(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote: > >> On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:28 PM, S Page <spage(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: >> >> > > >> > * enwiki says "Hello dolly" in quotes gives different results, mw >> directly >> > contradicts this. Even on my local wiki, quotes make a difference. >> > >> > * enwiki disagrees with itself what a dash in front of a word does. >> > >> >> I did some research a few weeks ago on the current state of Search and >> there are a number of discrepancies between the documentation and

actual

behavior. Some of them have BZ tickets, like https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44238 -Chris _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Federico Leva (Nemo)

5:59 a.m.

The "true" (old) MediaWiki documentation on search is still on Meta, it needs to be rewritten on mediawiki.org (PD and up to date): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching Nobody reads the help pages, sure. That's why they should be linked from the special pages etc. as some extensions already do. <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43591> Nemo

Peter Coombe

3:14 p.m.

There were over 300,000 views of [[en:Help:Searching]] in June. [1] It definitely needs some improvement, but having some accurate documentation of MediaWiki search features to work from would really help. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_Project/page_statistics Peter On 18 June 2013 01:59, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

The "true" (old) MediaWiki documentation on search is still on Meta, it needs to be rewritten on mediawiki.org (PD and up to date): https://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Help:Searching<https://meta.wikimedia.… Nobody reads the help pages, sure. That's why they should be linked from the special pages etc. as some extensions already do. < https://bugzilla.wikimedia.**org/show_bug.cgi?id=43591<https://bugzilla.…

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Brian Wolff

3:31 p.m.

My comments are based mostly on second hand knowledge. People who have tried have often ran into problems, asked for help on #mediawiki, and nobody knowing anything that can help them. Probably a large part of the issue is requiring people to install a separate (non-php) program that's not all that well documented. --bawolff On 6/17/13, Nikolas Everett <neverett(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

I'm not sure about http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Searching but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching has lots of things we're

going

to have to add to our list. My guess is http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Searching is simply out of date. Nik On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 4:33 PM, Chris McMahon <cmcmahon(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:28 PM, S Page <spage(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > > > * enwiki says "Hello dolly" in quotes gives different results, mw directly > contradicts this. Even on my local wiki, quotes make a difference. > > * enwiki disagrees with itself what a dash in front of a word does. > I did some research a few weeks ago on the current state of Search and there are a number of discrepancies between the documentation and actual behavior. Some of them have BZ tickets, like https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44238 -Chris _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Chad

3:38 p.m.

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Brian Wolff <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Well there's only so much we can do for people who are on shared hosting with only FTP and a database at their disposal. We could maybe improve SearchMysql a bit, but that's not really a goal with this project as we'd never use it on WMF sites. Solr, while still an external dependency, at least doesn't require people to build and configure a basically undocumented WMF-specific system to have a sane search. -Chad

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participants (8)

Brian Wolff
Chad
Chris McMahon
Eran Rosenthal
Federico Leva (Nemo)
Nikolas Everett
Peter Coombe
S Page