Wipipedia.org:Searching
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If you search e.g. for "book" you get only pages with that word, not pages with "books" only. However, on pages with "book" and "books", also the part "book" of the word "books" is highlighted. | If you search e.g. for "book" you get only pages with that word, not pages with "books" only. However, on pages with "book" and "books", also the part "book" of the word "books" is highlighted. | ||
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Latest revision as of 19:31, 25 November 2008
This page explains how to search the Wipipedia for what you are looking for
Contents |
[edit] Search facilities in Wipipedia
This page explains the search button for the search box which appears on every page and the "Search result settings" section in the preferences.
[edit] list of all pages
- Special:Allpages - Alphabetic index for the main namespace
Please note that a-z come after A-Z.
[edit] Go button
The Go button appears on all pages in the standard skin, next to the search button. The function of the Go button is to display a page directly, instead of first having to select it from the search result page. In other words, it allows you to quickly navigate from page to page without following links.
To view a page, just enter its name in the search field and click "Go".
See also Wikimedia Go button.
[edit] Search field
Pressing the [Enter] key while the search field is active is equivalent to clicking on the [Go] button. While this is obvious when using Internet Explorer (tested on version 6), Mozilla (version 1.6 at least) provides no such indication.
[edit] Tips
[edit] Avoid short and common words
This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all pages, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.
Note that although you can't search for a word such as "Dom" or "sub", you can enter the word in the textbox and click on Go to go direct to the page.
[edit] Search is case-insensitive
The searches for "gorean", "Gorean" and "GOREAN" all return the same results.
[edit] Phrase
There is no method for searching for a phrase. Contrary to what you might expect, enclosing phrases in double quotation marks such as "master's slave" will retrieve all pages containing "master's" and "slave".
[edit] Searching limitations and Gotchas
[edit] No regular expressions or wildcards
You cannot use regular expressions or wildcards such as ? or *. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it.
[edit] Words in single quotes
If a word appears in a page with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable it is better to use double quotes in pages, for which this problem does not arise.
An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe s is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.
[edit] Delay in updating the search index
For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes to pages are not always immediately taken into account in searches.
[edit] Search Options
[edit] Namespaces searched
The search only applies to the namespaces selected in the preferences. To search the other namespaces check or uncheck the tickboxes in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page. Depending on the browser, a box may still be checked from a previous search, but may no longer be effective. To be sure the box is in effect, uncheck and recheck it.
Searching the image namespace means searching the image descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the image pages. For searching the titles, use Special:Imagelist.
The URL is
where "qqq" is used as example for the search term, and 1's can be changed into 0's for excluding namespaces.
Thus, e.g.
searches the Template and Template talk namespaces for "test", and
searches the image description pages for "jpg".
(Also there is a special search feature Special:Imagelist, which searches in titles, regardless of whether there is an image description.)
Searching with the URL above does not work if the search term exists as a pagename in any namespace!
[edit] Redirects can be excluded
Check or uncheck the tickbox "List redirects" in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page.
[edit] The Wipipediatext is searched
The Wikitext (source text, what one sees in the edit box) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for InterWiki linking, special characters (if ê is coded as ê it is found searching for ecirc), etc.
[edit] Highlighting
Some portions of matching pages that contain the searched-for terms are shown, with the terms highlighted in red. You can set the number of lines extracted and the amount of text per line shown in your preferences.
If you search e.g. for "book" you get only pages with that word, not pages with "books" only. However, on pages with "book" and "books", also the part "book" of the word "books" is highlighted.
