Lets look in to adding some namespaces to the default search. We probably want Help: in there because people do want to find how-to use the wiki information within their search scope.
Help: and Fedoraproject: seem obvious ones to me.
It'd be best to do them all in one swoop though, so if you are able to prepare a list, I'll do it then.
FWIW, I'm open to all suggestions here, including a complete "No, stupid idea." I'm still learning my way around the Way of MediaWiki. That said ...
Here are the audiences we have/attract:
Based on the list of Namespaces here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Namespace
... these seem like the best namespaces to expose to all those audiences in a unified search:
FedoraProject Help Category
My reasoning around the inclusion of Category is that we tend to categorize by the things people search on: Documentation, Draft Documentation, FUDCon10, Packaging Guidelines, etc.
The question is, how much does that dirty the search? When searching a Category, does it pull in the actual contents of the Category page (i.e., returning all pages in a category in the search results), or just the Categories themselves? Are they mixed in or in a separate section the way Titles and Page contents are?
Do we have a sandbox/dev instance of the wiki to try stuff like this out?
Replying to [comment:2 kwade]:
... these seem like the best namespaces to expose to all those audiences in a unified search: FedoraProject Help Category Agreed The question is, how much does that dirty the search? When searching a Category, does it pull in the actual contents of the Category page (i.e., returning all pages in a category in the search results), or just the Categories themselves? Are they mixed in or in a separate section the way Titles and Page contents are? It shouldn't dirty it much, it will only search the content of the category page (not what pages are in the category) Do we have a sandbox/dev instance of the wiki to try stuff like this out? Technically no, but I'll put this on my l10n dev wiki on publictest10 at some point.
Agreed The question is, how much does that dirty the search? When searching a Category, does it pull in the actual contents of the Category page (i.e., returning all pages in a category in the search results), or just the Categories themselves? Are they mixed in or in a separate section the way Titles and Page contents are? It shouldn't dirty it much, it will only search the content of the category page (not what pages are in the category)
Do we have a sandbox/dev instance of the wiki to try stuff like this out? Technically no, but I'll put this on my l10n dev wiki on publictest10 at some point.
Also to note, is that these changes will only apply to new wiki accounts (first time users), to force the change to current users, it requires running a couple of 'maintenance' scripts. SO... my suggestion is:
Defer until l10n implementation (date unknown but should be within next month - it works!) The implementation may cause a bit of downtime for the en wiki (so we need to coordinate all that) which means it's a perfect chance to abuse the heck out of the DB server and get it all done quickly.
I hope it sounds sane :)
This got done during a wiki-outage a little bit back.
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