On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Jay Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Platonides" Platonides@gmail.com
People usually set it to 5000 and use the 'search in this page' feature of their browser. Which is far from convenient.
For a 2 years old bug requesting that needed feature, see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20858
Noted. Though I tend, myself, not to get the 'suggested implementation of fix' quite so tangled up in the bug report.
How are those messages *implemented*, internally? Are they in a page namespace not exposed to the standard system text search? Or are they just hardwired in somehow?
When loading up a MediaWiki: message page where there is no local page data, the string from the matching message/language is pulled from the localization system's base arrays. You can see this in Article::getContent().
This is reasonably transparent for looking at a page and getting initial text when editing it, but obviously means that those pages don't exist in: * page lists * contributions * history * recent changes * search index
Any message pages that *have* been edited and have actual local content will show up in all the above, just like other pages.
In principle the search engine interface could probably be extended to include something that would search through (the current language? site language? all languages?) when doing searches that include the MediaWiki: namespace so you end up with something that feels kind of like having them all in the base index whether they have been saved or not. But that doesn't exist at present.
-- brion