Topic on Talk:Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements

Issue:

As a user, it frequently happens that when I mistype a search string I give up searching because it shows no local results.

Background:

Wiktionary results are almost 100% always relevant. The reason is pretty simple, it adds a natural disambiguator, and it may serve as an improved "did you mean". It may help the reader / user to correct their results and search again. As it contains a lot of words and relevant synonyms, it also helps in the scenario where one looks for "automobile", "vehicle", "car" helping non-native speakers find more common words.

Finally the primary reason is that it is often the case that someone may be interested in a very simple fact about something, and they may find exactly what they are looking for without clicking any search results, by just looking at the wiktionary text snippet.

Proposed solution

1. Always put the wiktionary results as the first box in the sidebar cross-wiki results
2. Allow snippets to store more info so the wiktionary snippet can show more info at a glance
3. Potentially look into using Extension:TextExtracts to parse the page and show only the most relevant snippets without all maintenance templates and other unnecessary content.

It might also be fruitful to deploy the wiktionary results to all projects, including this one. The context it provides tends to help users retype their search queries and find what they are looking for.

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestions—we have a future update to the search results page that is a Wiktionary widget that I hope would be good for you and all our users. You can read more here and the A/B test page is here as well as a self-guided test you can add to your own logged in account.

Once we get done with all the testing and chat with the community about it, I think it would be great if we can put it on all Wikipedias and sister projects.

However, Wiktionary results won't always display, it just depends on the query the user inputs. But, we'll see what surfaces in our testing. :)

It looks pretty good. But it is missing the most interesting thing, clearly highlighted synonyms !

The results don't seem to clearly emphasize them: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=trunk&title=Special:Search&profile=default&fulltext=1&searchToken=3h3zlq4ixyinhbe07ko2gqjp1

It currently shows synonyms jumbled together with basic definitions of the word, when these are pretty useful for anyone searching and should at least be in bold.

It might also be useful to include the related image (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/Yellow_birch_trunk.jpg/220px-Yellow_birch_trunk.jpg).

In cases where wiktionary doesn't show anything, the other projects might make up for it.

Correction: As a user, it frequently happens that when I mistype a search string I give up searching because it shows no local results.

197.218.90.174 I have updated you initial question. If you press the three dots next to a post, an option to edit the post appears. Have a nice day!

Thanks. In case you weren't aware logged out users cannot edit their posts using Flow , they can only edit the title...

Thank you for letting me know. It was my understanding the IP users could edit posts that they created, why can't they @Quiddity (WMF)?

Hi, it's configured that way because IP addresses can be shared between many people (hundreds or even thousands). (Known addresses are sometimes tagged with a template, such as w:en:Template:Shared IP header templates at Enwiki, but it's not always obvious, and is inconsistently & manually applied.)

Note that aside from that restriction, there is also a restriction on who can edit other people's posts (Flow#Can I edit other people's posts?).

There was some discussion (a long time ago) about the desire to "enable IPs to edit their posts for x minutes after save" (5 or 30 etc). But I don't think anyone ever filed a task for it. I've now filed phab:T169167.