Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements/self-guided testing

Display of sister projects on search results page


Base sample url:


 * 


 * In order to get a base URL and page in which to test with, go ahead and add in a tilde (~) before the search term  in the URL to force the display of the search results page. Currently, using just the term   in a typical search query string will redirect to the page called 'Rainbow' on English Wikipedia.


 * Now, we'll add in the portion of the query that will automatically display the sister projects on the search results page:




 * This addition will also remove the need to have the tilde in front of the search term:


 * 


 * ...and viola! You now see a search results page that has results from the Wikimedia sister projects!

Change search term:
 * Now - to update the search term to see more sister projects snippets in the search results page - simply change the search term in the URL. For instance, we're currently using:
 * , so, let's change that to


 * ...which would make the new URL to be:



Change to a different Wikipedia:


 * In order to try this out on other language wikis, simply change the language identifier in the URL. Currently, our sample URL is being used to search on English Wikipedia, and we now want to search on German Wikipedia for the city of Munchen. Change the two letters of  to   and update the   query parameter to get a full URL of:



Explore similar on search results page

 * The explore similar functionality will add a link (activated by a mouse hover or click) which will display related pages, categories and a listing of other languages that the article can be read in. To have this functionality built into your logged in experience, you'll need to edit your common.js file. Not sure if you have a common.js file? Make sure you're logged in and then use this url and see if the common.js file needs to be created (I've used enwiki and my user name in my example):




 * Go ahead and create it if you need to and then add in this line:




 * and save your common.js file. Now, when you get the search results page from a query, you'll see the 'explore similar' link with each search result.

Wiktionary widget on search results page

 * The Wiktionary widget is a cool little experimental API that pulls information from English Wikitionary and will display a variety of things - pronunciation, a short definition, what part of a sentence it is (noun, adjective, verb) and samples of usage. Depending on the word,