Last modified: 2013-07-25 09:00:50 UTC
Currently at <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&redirs=1&ns0=1&ns1=1&search=%22an+United+States%22>, there are pagination controls only at the bottom of the page. Those pagination controls should also appear at the top of the page, similar to Special:Contributions, Special:Log, etc.
It looks like code for this exists, but is commented out. In includes/specials/SpecialSearch.php, line 364: //$out->addHTML( "<p class='mw-search-pager-top'>{$prevnext}</p>\n" ); It was commented out in this revision, with the comment 'Redesign of the "new search UI" per Trevor's design plans from usability wiki': https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/core.git;a=commitdiff;h=abd70a35546b0e53538cd3bd2a2cd5e8a486fd96
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/49930/
The code is ok but we have to find out whether we actually want to restore the pagination link at the top of the search result. It got removed because it has no real value being before the result, the user would browse down the list of change and ends up seeing the pagination links at the bottom and use thoses, not the top one.
On the first page, hiding the top pagination controls might make sense. On the second or third page of results, however... I dunno.
I agree in opposing the change in general. I think from a usability point of view it is justified to have the pagination only on one side of the page. The bottom in our case. I don't see why they should be on top as well. When you're on #1, you see the top results. At that point there is no previous page, and going straight to the next page doesn't make sense since the first page is more likely to contain what you're looking for. By the time you have looked through the first page, you're at the bottom and can continue to the next page. If you're on a later page wanting to go back, you can simply use the browser controls to go back. The only use case left is going to a different page that you haven't visited before (e.g. If a user is paginating back and forth jumping from page 1 to 10 and then to 9) then you'd also look through the page first (why would you immediately want to switch from page 10 to 9 if you just arrived on page 10, you'd look through first..) Marking WONTFIX as usability seems fine in this regard. And adding it would in my opinion not only make no improvement, but actually make things worse by cluttering the interface further and decreasing usefulness of content above the fold.
(In reply to comment #5) > I agree in opposing the change in general. I think from a usability point of > view it is justified to have the pagination only on one side of the page. The > bottom in our case. I don't see why they should be on top as well. I just hit this issue again recently. The issue that in addition to pagination controls being hidden (next 50, etc.), the limit controls (50 | 100 | 500) are also hidden. So I was searching for a particular string and wanted 500 results (instead of 50, which my default). Each time I did new search, I had to scroll all the way down to get a larger data set. This is silly.
I have abandoned Gerrit change #49930
