New MediaWiki search features on Wikipedia
Two great features now appear on Wikipedia search:
1 – Blue box on right – search results from sister projects! (It does show results from other projects, but Wikinews is the most common.)
2 – Parenthetical links after article names – links to specific article sections. Useful for jumping to the relevant part of an article right away.
(For all I know they were enabled ages ago, but I only just noticed.)
I’m guessing these are native MediaWiki features rather than admin-enabled JavaScript etc hacks, but can anyone tell me for sure?
Comment
As a wikinewsie – thats awesome :) Thanks for showing me this.
This would be native mediawiki (or probably an extension/its something in the php side) as its in the html source.
— bawolff · 17. October 2008, 16:44
I do not know whether it is native or not but this feature is not enabled on Swedish Wikipedia. See for example: http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=Australien&ns0=1&fulltext=S%C3%B6k
— Jan Ainali · 18. October 2008, 05:58
Somehow Common is excluded :-( For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Belarus&fulltext=Search
— Eugene · 18. October 2008, 06:18
@Jan: Hm… what a mystery!
@Eugene: I am not surprised Commons is excluded, it would be much more difficult to rig up picture results. (On the English Wikipedia search page there is a comment about going to Commons to search for images anyway.)
— pfctdayelise · 18. October 2008, 11:35
This is a feature of the updated Lucene search backend, which Robert has started deploying since we’ve gotten the new search servers installed.
I’m not sure exactly when this addition got installed, but a number of such improvements are being experimented with. :)
— Brion · 19. October 2008, 02:28
@Brion: please enable it on all wikis! :)
— Lugusto/555 · 19. October 2008, 11:02
More info by Robert Stojnic on wikitech-l.
— pfctdayelise · 20. October 2008, 12:17
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