I've been a Wikipedia trainer at schools for quite some time now. Probably the single most common mistake people in my workshops make when accessing a Wiki's meta pages (i.e. "Wikipedia:Help") is by omitting the colon indicating the namespace.
The default search namespace is just NS-0, i.e. the main namespace. This means if you enter "Wikisource Help" on en.wikisource.org, you get nothing useful: http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?search=Wikisource+Help&button=&...
English Wikipedia has implemented a workaround by creating redirects from the main namespace to the project namespace: an ugly fix, since it mixes up the distinction between namespaces.
Instead, we should make MediaWiki a bit smarter with regard to the namespace selection: When you search for "Help Editing", the Help namespace should be included.
This could be done in the most simplest form by checking whether a namespace string is a prefix of the search string (perhaps excluding exotic namespaces such as MediaWiki) or even if the namespace name is contained in the search string.
What do you think?
Best regards, Tobias
On 01/06/2014 04:42 PM, Tobias wrote:
This could be done in the most simplest form by checking whether a namespace string is a prefix of the search string (perhaps excluding exotic namespaces such as MediaWiki) or even if the namespace name is contained in the search string.
Perhaps an even simpler implementation is to simply include a namespace in the search whenever its name (or perhaps one of a short list of plausible equivalents) is included in the search tokens.
I agree that someone typing "help tables" in the search box is almost certainly trying to find documentation and not articles.
-- Marc
I like the idea. I wonder a few things: 1. Is this something that only makes sense to do for the help namespace? 2. Would it be good enough to catch "help me" kinds of queries and provide a "did you mean"-like suggestion for a new search that'd actually search help?
Nik
On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Tobias church.of.emacs.ml@googlemail.comwrote:
I've been a Wikipedia trainer at schools for quite some time now. Probably the single most common mistake people in my workshops make when accessing a Wiki's meta pages (i.e. "Wikipedia:Help") is by omitting the colon indicating the namespace.
The default search namespace is just NS-0, i.e. the main namespace. This means if you enter "Wikisource Help" on en.wikisource.org, you get nothing useful:
http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?search=Wikisource+Help&button=&...
English Wikipedia has implemented a workaround by creating redirects from the main namespace to the project namespace: an ugly fix, since it mixes up the distinction between namespaces.
Instead, we should make MediaWiki a bit smarter with regard to the namespace selection: When you search for "Help Editing", the Help namespace should be included.
This could be done in the most simplest form by checking whether a namespace string is a prefix of the search string (perhaps excluding exotic namespaces such as MediaWiki) or even if the namespace name is contained in the search string.
What do you think?
Best regards, Tobias
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