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Proposal:Search access to help and project

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation


Summary

Provide enhanced search results to, by default, include separate sections for project namespace and help namespace results (Excluding talk pages). This could be limited to title matches only.

For non existing pages automatically populated list of near title matches in help and project namespaces could also be provided.

Proposal

In the English wikipedia at least cross namespace redirects are discouraged, to provide separation between the end content and the project to generate that content. This is a good idea, however it isn't particularly helpful for new users. Search defaults to the main namespace so also doesn't help finding this other content easily.

In order to maintain the segregation but make the system more usable, the search results could be enhanced to (by default) include title matches in the project and help namespaces. These results would be segregated on screen and suitable text provided to be clear that they are help/project and not content pages.

Similar could occur on non-existant pages, rather than just the empty page and logs, the close title matches could be provided there.

Motivation

Simplifies project and help navigation for inexperienced users, removing requirement for cross namespace redirects where the project doesn't "like" them. Where a project is happy with cross namespace redirects still provides automatic access to new content within the other namespaces without explicit creation of redirects.


Key Questions

Potential Costs

References

Community Discussion

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