Topic on Extension talk:CirrusSearch

Hi,

as in title. Are these supported? If not, could you point me to a Phabricator task? On my wiki we've got two content namespaces (one for official, other for unofficial content), but unfortunately the second namespace is never suggested in suggestions. Are there any workarounds maybe? (without disabling Cirrus suggestions)

Alternatively, if someone has some pointers how to potentially implement it in the extension, I'd gladly appreciate them - though I've never done any search work in the past.

Getting suggestions (title completion) should be supported.

For 2 pages:

• My_Page
• Unofficial:My_Page

I suspect that what you want when typing "Ma Pag" in the search box is getting at least these two pages suggested?

If yes I think that the way to get this working is:

1. Configure wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault with [ 0 => 1, 100 => 1 ] (assuming that 100 is the Unofficial namespace)

Note that changing wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault will require reindexing your wiki.

You can see it in action on https://es.wikipedia.org for examples, where the Author and Portal namespaces are searched by default, if you search for `Lenguas portuguesa` you should obtain results from both the main content namespace and the Portal namespace.

Note that it is likely that the suggestions from these extra namespaces are ranked very low compared to the ones from the main namespace.

I'll link the wiki as it may be helpful for the thread: https://ark.wiki.gg/. We use the main namespace for official game content, and a "Mod" namespace for unofficial modifications, all following a format of a mod's main page at "Mod:modname", and mod's content as sub-pages to that main page. For example "Mod:ARK Additions/Acrocanthosaurus".

In my expectations, typing "Acro", "Acrocantho", or the full title "Acrocanthosaurus", in the mw-head search bar would suggest the article that's in the Mod namespace. We have no other page titled Acrocanthosaurus in any namespace (ignoring files of course). However, there are simply no results returned at all.

To get the suggestions, the reader has to type the mod namespace prefix and the mod's name. "Mod:ARK Additions/Acr" returns valid suggestions. There's no "partial" completion, the prefix must be complete and without typos. And that's not very intuitive or useful.

Regular Special:Search already handles this well [enough], and our mod namespace is weighed below main.

(I've put "enough" in brackets, as searching for "acrocanth" in Special:Search yields no results until a wildcard is added to the end. I'm not familiar with Cirrus's configuration though, so not sure if there's a setting to alter the behaviour so search acts as if there was a wildcard at all times. However, this is not related to this thread.)

You seem to use the fuzzy-subphrases profile of the completion suggester which allows it to complete in the middle of the titles. When running a completion search across multiple namespaces the CompletetionSuggester (if enabled) will only work and use this algorithm for the main namespace, the other namespaces will be searched using the classic prefix search algorithm. This is why searching for Acro does not yield Mod:ARK Additions/Acrocanthosaurus, you have to search for ARK Additions Acro for it to work.

So indeed, in order to support subphrase matching in your context the CompletionSuggester would have to be adapted to support multiple namespaces, sadly it was not designed with this use-case in mind. I'm unclear on what could be the main difficulty here to adapt the codebase but at a glance I think the context-suggester have to be used and I fear that the assumption that only NS_MAIN is indexed is probably hard-coded in many places.

An alternative might be to change how the classic prefix search works by enabling wgCirrusSearchPrefixSearchStartsWithAnyWord, we never enabled this on WMF wikis so I don't have much experience on how it behaves but it might greatly help to increase recall on non-main namespaces in your case

Note that enabling wgCirrusSearchPrefixSearchStartsWithAnyWord requires re-indexing your wiki with UpdateSearchIndexConfig.php.

Interesting, thank you. I'll get in contact with our hosting platform provider about current Cirrus settings, and I'll set up a sandbox to test out the variable you mentioned. I might have a try at getting more familiar with the extension's internals for the CompletionSuggester (mainly for fun), but currently need to burn through my existing to-do lists...

Also... it seems the slash is required in "ARK Additions/Acro" to get article results. Dropping the slash only returns our legacy redirects. Still useful to know!