Last modified: 2014-10-18 12:01:32 UTC
In gerrit change I0c448bcee877e027ff95c96812aac86d89d4eb32 the shortcut to search "Help and Project pages" was removed with the moot explanation "The vast majority of wikis have an empty help namespace and searching project pages is mostly an advanced search feature." This was a very unfortunate change though: * Many (Wikimedia) Wikis heavily use the "Project" and "Help" name spaces, including the five largest Wikipedias (enwiki/svwiki/nlwiki/dewiki/frwiki), as well as Commons and MediaWiki itself. * As a user (regardless whether being experienced or a beginner) there are two very common searches: a) content (either articles or media) b) help (this ranges from the most fundamental topics like help on how write articles or upload/create media over more advanced but not less important topics like which guidelines or policies to follow to expert topics like how to program Templates/JavaScript/Lua We have a) but with the mentioned change b) was deleted without substitution. It's now pretty hard to search for help topics (since one actually has to use the "advanced" search and select all the relevant name spaces manually). While this might only be inconvenient for experienced users it has basically made searching for help impossible for the default/new user and therefore the user group that needs help most urgently. I therefore request to revert the change and add back a shortcut to search in "Help and Project pages".
My pragmatic proposal was bug 66066.
