Last modified: 2011-06-07 20:36:17 UTC
We are currently creating a new page structure for the Research: namespace on Meta and we realized that creating subpages like: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects/Participatory_Motivation_to_Commons-based_Peer_Production makes it really hard to find them via the internal search engine. In particular it looks like the search form can only match phrases, not individual keywords, and having to prefix each query with "Research:Projects/" is not practical at all. We recently created a namespace alias (R:) which can help shorten these queries into something more manageable (if you type "R:Pro" it will automatically expand to match "Research:Pro") but I was wondering if there was an easy way to configure the search form to match keywords so that if I start typing "Participatory" or "Peer Production" it will match the title of the above page.
Reassigned to Priyanka
I've tested one simple implementation briefly. In this implementation if you start typing Par.. it would try to match it with any word in the title (not only the starting one). The problem with this is that there are many such articles (many more than starting with Par..) and they in fact in most cases obscure the ones you really want. Or to be more technical, this would give you larger recall, but for a cost of much smaller precision. One solution might be that if the search suggest doesn't find the word you typed as the first one (e.g. no articles starting with Participatory) then it would start to look at other words as well.
I verified with DarTar that this is no longer an immediate requirement since he went back to using the main namespace. Using the Research namespace gets complicated for a lot of reasons. Marking this as won't fix.
