Misplaced Pages

Latest revision as of 10:30, 14 January 2025

This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Misplaced Pages community. It is not one of Misplaced Pages's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus.

Shortcut H:S

Misplaced Pages uses a powerful search engine, with a search box on every page. The search box will navigate directly to a given page name upon an exact match. But, you can force it to show you other pages that include your search string by including a tilde character ~ anywhere in the query. The maximum search string is 300 characters long. However, search can instantly search all 62,323,930 pages on the wiki when the search is kept to a simple word or two.

Misplaced Pages's searches can be made domain-specific (i.e., search in desired namespaces). The search engine also supports special characters and parameters to extend the power of searches and allow users to make their search strings more specific.

Advanced features of the Misplaced Pages search engine include multi-word proximity-searches (in which the user indicates how close the words in a phrase might be), wildcard searches, "fuzzy" ~ searches (handles typo-correction and questionable spelling), and several wiki-oriented operators and parameters for weighting and filtering. Search can also handle regular expressions, a sophisticated exact-string and string-pattern search tool that is not offered by most public search engines.

Search can also filter results by template names used, category membership, or pages linking to a specific page.

Special:Preferences offers several search options, and Misplaced Pages:Tools § Searching offers the setups of other users.

Search box

The search box is an input box with the placeholder text "Search Misplaced Pages" in it. In Misplaced Pages's default Vector 2022 skin, it is located in the header of the page at the top of the screen.

To use the search box, click in it, or jump to it by pressing ⇧ Shift+Alt+F, and type in your search string. Then, either click ↵ Enter, or the Search button.

If your search matches a page name exactly, search will navigate to the page directly instead of showing search results. To get search results instead, prepend the first word of the search string (i.e., the page name) with a tilde ("~"). (Or choose "Search for pages containing" from the suggestions that drop down as you type.)

In the former default skin Vector, the search box is located in the top right hand corner, and instead of a search button, there is an icon of a magnifying glass on the right-hand end of the search box. Pressing ↵ Enter or clicking on the magnifying glass when the box is empty takes you directly to Misplaced Pages's search page. Prior to that, in Monobook it was in the middle of the sidebar on the left of the screen.

JavaScript, and thus possibly user scripts, and skins have an effect on the search/navigate default behavior. Monobook's default is to navigate, and Vector's default is search; however, when JavaScript is on, the Vector skin will navigate. Monobook's Go will navigate, and is the default, but Monobook has a Search button.

Search string

Whatever you type into the search box is called the "search string". It may also be referred to as the "search query".

A basic search string is simply the topic you are interested in reading about. A direct match of a basic search string will navigate you directly to Misplaced Pages's article that has that title. A non-match, or any other type of search string will take you to Misplaced Pages's search results page, where the results of your search are displayed.

Terms in the search string are subject to stem matching, except for anything included between double quotation marks.

You can include in your search string special characters and parameters that activate specific search capabilities. Using any of these will take you to Misplaced Pages's search results page with the results of your search displayed.

The maximum search string is 300 characters long.

The format of the text that is entered is called search string syntax.

Search string syntax

Search is case insensitive, that is, upper and lowercase is ignored.

Search "folds" character families, matching similar-looking letters across alphabets, to match foreign terms. So, you don't have to type in diacritical letters, and your terms will still match. For example, a search on Citroen will also match Citroën, and Aeroskobing matches Ærøskøbing.

Characters that are not numbers or letters (punctuation marks, brackets and slashes, math and other symbols) are generally ignored. For example, Credit (finance) will return articles with the words credit and finance, ignoring the parentheses, unless an article with exact title Credit (finance) exists. Similarly, a search for the string |LT| (letters LT between two pipe symbols) will only return articles with lt. In order to search for terms that contain non-alphanumeric characters, a regex search must be used instead (using the \ escape character if required); for example, insource:/\|LT\|/ will successfully return all instances of |LT|.

The source text is what is searched, which is not always what is displayed on the screen. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for interlanguage links (to find links to Chinese articles, search for zh, not for Zhongwen), special characters (if ê is coded as ê it is found searching for ecirc), etc.

For regex searches, see the insource: parameter below.

Namespaces

The default search domain is the article space, but any namespace may be specified in a query.

At the search results page, any number of namespaces can be specified, and users can keep those namespaces as their own default search domain. Partial namespace searches can be made by specifying the initial letters of a page name.

Spaces

The use of spaces is, in general, intuitive. Unnecessary spaces, and all non-alphanumeric characters except " are ignored, which makes for flexibility; it is simplest and best to avoid typing unnecessary spaces, although the tolerance for grey space simplifies copying and pasting search terms without the need for cleanup. For example, credit card is obviously reasonable; copying and pasting ] is equivalent and convenient; "credit card""payment card" is actually correct and minimal, but "credit card" "payment card" is an intuitive equivalent.

Any of the following characters will be treated as a space character: !@#$%^&()_+-=~`{}|\:;'<>,.?/. The double quotation mark " is not one of these characters, because it has the special purpose of specifying an exact phrase search, and - and ! can be used to exclude results if either occurs at the beginning of a word or phrase (see more below). We use the term grey-space instead of whitespace here to include the space character itself and all these characters. Multiple spaces are equivalent to a single space.

Grey-space is ignored between the words of exact-phrase searches, between adjacent items in the query, and in starting characters of the search box query. All filters can have grey-space between them without affecting search results. Most operators, such as intitle: and incategory:, ignore unnecessary spaces, or grey-space, after the colon.

Where spaces are significant: single search terms cannot have embedded spaces; work space, "work space", and workspace are all different. The particular keywords prefix and insource must be followed immediately by a colon : and their arguments, without intervening spaces.

Special characters

• H:SPCHAR

For regex searches, see the insource: parameter below.

Double quotes for exact phrase search

A phrase can be matched by enclosing it in double quotes, "like this". Double quotes can define a single search term that contains spaces. For example, "holly dolly" where the space is quoted as a character, differs much from holly dolly where the space is interpreted as a logical AND.

Suffixed tilde character for fuzzy search

• H:FUZZY

Spelling relaxation is requested by suffixing a tilde ~, like this~ to match results like thus and thins. It covers any two character-changes for any character except the first: it returns addition, exchange, or subtraction. This search technique is sometimes called a "sounds-like" search. For example, searching for charlie~ parker~ returns Charlie Parker, Charles Palmer, Charley Parks, etc.

Prefixed tilde character for forced search

• H:FORCE

To force a search rather than navigate directly to a matching page, include a tilde character ~ anywhere in the query. It always takes you to the search results page, never jumping to a single title. For example, the misspelling similiar is redirected to the Similarity article (or, in this case, disambiguation page); but prefixing a tilde, ~similiar, lists pages containing that misspelling.

Prefixed hyphen or exclamation point for exclusion

• H:EXCLUDE

Pages matching a search term can be excluded by prefixing an exclamation point (!) or a hyphen (-) to the term. This is the logical NOT. For example, credit card -"credit card" finds all articles with credit and card except those with the phrase credit card.

Wildcard characters

• H:WLD

The two wildcard characters are * and \?, and both can come in the middle or end of a word. The escaped question mark stands for one character and the star stands for any number of characters. Because many users ask questions when searching, question marks are ignored by default, and the escaped question mark (\?) must be used for a wildcard.

Non-alphabetic characters

For non-alphabetic characters, regex expressions are needed. (See insource: below.)

Logical operators

• H:BOOLEAN
• H:LOPS

The search engine supports limited boolean logic in searches. Logical NOT (negation) can be indicated by a "-" (minus sign) or a "!" (exclamation point) character prefixed to a search term, or by the NOT keyword.

Parentheses (…) are ignored by the search engine and have no effect.

Search terms are implicitly joined by logical AND (conjunction). For example "credit card" housecat searches for pages containing both "credit card" and "housecat". An OR operator is supported, but will only give intuitive results (corresponding to logical disjunction) if all search terms are separated by OR (e.g. red OR green OR blue has the expected behaviour, but red OR green blue does not). OR also does not behave predictably with special keywords (like intitle:) or namespaces. (See mw:Help:CirrusSearch/Logical operators for a more detailed explanation.)

Parameters

• H:PARAM

Parameters function as name filters, each followed by the search term it operates on. Their search term may be a word or a phrase. The main parameters are namespace:, intitle:, insource:, incategory:, and prefix: (namespace as used here isn't literal – use the name of the actual namespace desired).

prefix: differs from the other parameters in that it can only be used at the end of a search string.

A single namespace: filter can go first, and a single prefix: filter can go last.

namespace:

Only articles are searched by default because most users are only readers. Given only at the beginning of the query, a namespace name followed by a colon limits search results to that namespace. It is a filter without a query string. The namespace can also be selected at Special:Search.

Namespace aliases like WP: or wp: instead of Misplaced Pages: are accepted.

User: will normally go directly to a user page even if it doesn't exist. To search userspace, use Special:Search or click "Search for pages containing" below the search box.

all: will search all namespaces.

To search multiple namespaces but not all, use "Search in:" at Special:Search.

all:

• H:ALL

Prefixing all: (in lower case) searches all namespaces, sorted by namespace, and with substring matches at the end.

intitle:

• H:INTIT
• H:INTITLE

Page titles and redirects can be searched with intitle:query, where query is the search string. The search results highlight occurrences in both the title and page content. Multiple intitle: filters may be used to search for words in titles regardless of order, or in different titles (i.e., redirects) for the same article. Regular expressions can be used with intitle:/regexp/ or the case insensitive intitle:/regexp/i. (See more in the insource section.)

insource:

• H:INSOURCE

This can find template arguments, URLs, links, html, etc. It has two forms, one is an indexed search, and the other is regex-based.

incategory:

• H:INCAT
• H:INCATEGORY

Given as incategory:category, where category is the page name of a category page, it lists pages assigned to the given category by methods including the addition of ] to their wikitext. (Editors searching in namespaces other than mainspace will need to know the limitations these search results may contain.) If the category page name includes space characters; replace the spaces with underscores (e.g. incategory:Pages_of_interest), surround the page name with double quotes (e.g. incategory:"Pages of interest") or both (but not on the Wikimedia Commons site). incategory: will also return pages in the adjacent subcategory (see for example, category: incategory:History). Multiple incategory: filters may be applied. A more graphical alternative to a single filter is at Special:CategoryTree. Because categories are important structures for searching for related articles, any use of this prefix is particularly effective for searching. (For more on using the categories themselves to find articles, see Misplaced Pages:FAQ/Categories.)

deepcategory:

• H:DEEPCAT

Also deepcat:, this allows you to search in a category and all its subcategories. The depth of the tree is currently limited to 5 levels, and the overall number of categories is limited to 1000.

Examples:

prefix:

• H:PREFIX

prefix:page name patterns only the beginning characters of a page name. Because the "beginning" characters can, if you need, go on to include the characters all the way to the end of the page name, prefix must include spaces, since page names often include spaces. For this reason prefix: must only ever be given as the last part of a search box query, and next character after the colon cannot be a space. prefix: does not search for partial namespace names, but requires at least a full namespace name to start to find pages, but prefix: also recognizes an alias of a namespace, and it recognizes redirects (or shortcut). Prefix is the most widely used and powerful filter as it can mimic the namespace filter, and because intitle: cannot easily target a single page, even together with other filters. Special:PrefixIndex is a MediaWiki, graphical, version, using only prefix: to find pages.

linksto:

• H:LINKSTO

linksto:page name searches in pages that link to the given page. Can be used negatively by prefixing a hyphen, which will return pages that do not link to the given page. Unlike with some other keywords, the page name is case-sensitive.

subpageof:

• H:SUBOF

This limits searches to subpages of the specified page. You can also negate the subpages from a search by preceding subpageof: with a hyphen. Note that articles on Misplaced Pages don't have subpages, but the pages of the other namespaces do. Therefore, use the namespace parameter also, or select the namespace at Special:Search. Here are some examples:

For User: searches, click "Search for pages containing" or use Special:Search. This is not needed for other namespaces. To look at all the subpages of a user, try this:

User:subpageof:AzaToth

That will display all the subpages of User:AzaToth. They can also be seen at Special:PrefixIndex/User:AzaToth/ but Special:PrefixIndex cannot be combined with a search.

To make sure Articles for deletion pages do not show up in the results of a Misplaced Pages namespace search, try this:

Misplaced Pages:"Hi there" -subpageof:"Articles for deletion"

That will show pages from the Misplaced Pages namespace with "Hi there" in them, and the list of results will not be cluttered with any WP:Articles for deletion debates (there are hundreds of thousands). Notice the use of the hyphen (that makes it mean "not subpages of").

hastemplate:

• H:HASTEMP

This finds pages that use the specified template. Input the canonical page name to find all usage of the template, but use any of its redirect page names finds just that naming. Namespace aliases are accepted, capitalization is entirely ignored, and redirects are found, all in one name-search.

This is more thorough than insource:, in that it will find meta-templates (templates called by another template). Meta-templates don't show up in the local page's wikitext.

Example of hastemplate: usage:

hastemplate:"Article for deletion/dated"

This lets you find all the articles being considered for deletion.

intitle:"Outline of " -hastemplate:"Outline footer"

This lets you find Misplaced Pages outlines that lack the outline footer template. (Notice the use of the hyphen to indicate "NOT").

articletopic:

This keyword allows filtering search results by topic. (For possible topics see mw:Help:CirrusSearch/articletopic.) E.g. articletopic:books will filter the search results to articles about books. articletopic:books|films will filter to articles about books or films. articletopic:books articletopic:films will filter to articles which are about both books and films.

Only mainspace articles belong to topics. Unlike most other filters, articletopic: also does page weighting: articles which are a stronger match for a topic will be higher in the search results (while articles which aren't about that subject at all will be removed from the result set completely).

Topic models are derived via machine learning from ORES. Any given article receives a score on dozens of different topics, and therefore may appear under different keywords. For instance, the article on Albert Einstein may appear as a "physics" article and a "biography" article. Topic-related search data is updated weekly, so recently created articles might not show up in topic-based search queries.

inproject:

Allows filtering of search results to pages in given WikiProjects. Examples:

• inproject:Cricket filters to pages in WikiProject Cricket
• inproject:Cricket|Football filters to pages in either WikiProject Cricket or WikiProject Football.
• inproject:Football inproject:Cricket filters to only pages which are in both WikiProjects
• inproject:"Africa/Seychelles work group" filters to pages in the Seychelles work group of WikiProject Africa.

A list of all possible projects and subprojects can be obtained via the API.

Note this filter only works on wikis with Extension:PageAssessments installed (which includes English Misplaced Pages)

Search page

The search page features a search box, with some links to search domains beneath it. (For information on what can by typed into the search box, see Search string syntax above.)

The main difference between this search box and the one that appears on article pages is that exact matches on this one will not navigate you directly to an article page. This search box will produce the search results page showing what all matches your search on Misplaced Pages.

To get to the search page, perform an empty search (press ↵ Enter while in the search box before typing anything else in), or click on the Search button. The link Special:Search, which can be inserted onto user pages or project pages, for example, also leads to the search page.

While the entire contents of the search page is included in the search results page, it is a distinct page. User scripts might be designed to work on the search results page but not the search page, for example.

(For an explanation of the controls available on the search page, see Refining results below.)

Search results page

• H:RESULTS

The search results page looks just like the search page, with the results for your search query presented below it. (For information on what can by typed into the search box, see Search string syntax above.)

The search results page is displayed when a search is done from the search page, when a search from the regular search box does not exactly match a page title, or when any parameters or special characters are included in a search string.

Understanding search results

The search string entered will be displayed in the search box on the page, in case you wish to modify it.

Spelling corrections and query corrections are offered at the top of the results (see Preliminary reports, below).

Note that search results include content from templates displayed on the pages searched.

The order that search results are presented in is based on the page ranking software.

Results match word stems, along with their various tenses (past tense, plural tense, etc.), except for anything included between double quotation marks. See Stem matching, below.

Throughout the results, matching terms are highlighted in bold. All matches in the title show for sure, while matches within the details may show, but not if they are far apart on the page.

Matches are included for section headings, members of matching categories, and destination pages of redirects. These will show off to the side of the page name, parenthetically.

A single result (one each) from selected sister projects appears on the right side of the page (the most likely relevant match for each). This feature may be permanently turned off in Preferences.

Files from Wikimedia Commons are included within the results when the File: namespace has been selected. You can prepend search terms with local: to limit results to locally uploaded files.

Preliminary reports

Search results will often be accompanied by a preliminary report.

• There is a page named "Page name" (a wikilink to an existing page)
• Did you mean: spelling correction (either a wikilink or a search-link)
• You may create the page "New title" (a redlink to a new page name)

The Did you mean report corrects dictionary word spellings and gives a link that is either a wikilink that will navigate to an article or a search link that will perform a query. The distinction can be made by observing the presence of a You may create the page report. Another report corrects "spellings" to coincide with any "word" found in a search index (any word on the wiki):

Refining results

• H:REFINE

The Search page is designed for presenting and refining results in a re-search loop controlled by modifying the query or the search parameters, such as namespace.

Namespaces

Articles are in the main namespace, or "article space", but Special:Statistics will show that there are many times more pages on Misplaced Pages than there are articles on Misplaced Pages. Other types of pages are in other namespaces, and these can be selected using the checkboxes that appear when expanding the section labelled Search in: under the search box.

• "Default": Only search encyclopedia articles (also called mainspace).
• "Discussion": Search talk pages. Some discussions are in the Misplaced Pages: namespace, which can be included by also selecting "General help" (which also adds help pages) or by selecting "Misplaced Pages" under "Add namespaces…".
• "General Help": Search the Help: namespace and Misplaced Pages: namespace (also called project namespace). The latter contains various types of pages including many help pages.
  • Unfortunarely, there is no reliable way to exclude discussion pages from the results, but you can try adding to your query -insource:/\(UTC\)/ (which would also exclude help pages containing "(UTC)"); or try something more delicate like this (which would also exclude help subpages of WikiProjects).
• "All": Search every page on the entire wiki, for example also drafts and user pages.

Click "Add namespaces…" to select namespaces individually.

In order to fully interpret the search results page, check which search domains are checked off, but also remember to check for a namespace name at the beginning or a prefix: parameter at the end of the search box query. A namespace entered in a query always takes priority for determination of the search domain of a query, and will at any time override your default search domain, or any displayed profile. A prefix: parameter at the end of a query in the search box, furthermore, will override any namespace there, or any profile underneath that. Equivalently, you could check the URL in your browser's address bar for profile and namespace parameter settings, because the search query was sent to the search engine by way of that URL.

Sorting

By default, results are ordered by relevance. The "Sorting order" control in the "Advanced search" section allows you to select two other sort orders: most recently edited, and most recently created.

An advanced technique is to manually modify the URL to achieve other sort orders. For example, adding &sort=incoming_links_desc to the end of the URL will sort pages with the most incoming links to the top, and &sort=random will randomly order results. For a full list of available sort orders, see mw:Help:CirrusSearch#Explicit sort orders.

Search settings

There is a Preferences → Search tab. (You must be logged in.)

The default search domain is article space, but any user can change this default, and have their own default search domain for all the queries they run. In any case a query always can specify a namespace to make the search domain explicit and override any default. At the search results page, Special:Search, Advanced dialog, a search can specify any number of namespaces, and logged-in users can set their default search domain there by clicking "Remember selection for future searches".

Visit your Preferences → Gadgets page (requires JavaScript) to set up:

• several external search engines' views of Misplaced Pages. The search results page will then have a pull down list to the left of its search box, offering your choice as, say, a modification of a word or phrase search, or a page ranking refinement. Go to Preferences → Gadgets Appearance, and see "Add a selector to the Misplaced Pages search page allowing the use of external search engines."
• a wider search box. Go to Appearance and find "Widen the search box in the Vector skin."
• Preferences → Search → Completion. Spell-correct titles dropped-down from the search box as you type, or not. Or go to Preferences → Appearance and see "Disable the suggestions dropdown-lists of the search fields".

The search results page can open in a new tab. See Preferences → Gadgets Browsing There are also custom user-scripts to make all search results always open in a new tab. (See the scripts available in See also.)

To hide/opt-out the search results snippets from sister projects, go to Preferences → Gadgets → Appearance and see "Do not show search results for sister projects on the search results page".

Tips and tricks

Searching within a page

The internal search engine cannot locate occurrences of a string within the page you are viewing but browsers can usually do this with Ctrl+F, or ⌘ Command+F on a Mac.

Searching for a specific person's contributions

Due to the way the wikimedia database is indexed, there's no direct way to search for something like insource:foo author:person. But, you can come close in some situations. If you're looking for something on a talk (or, sometimes, project) page, people tend to leave a signature after each edit, and such pages are usually set up so old edits roll off onto archive pages. In this case, the proximity search operator can find instances of your search term near the user's name. Something like foo person ~50 might find what you are looking for.

Search Misplaced Pages from any web page

To get Misplaced Pages search results while on any web page, you can temporarily set your web browser's search box to become a Misplaced Pages search search box, even though you're on another web site (see Help:Searching from a web browser). This trick removes the need to first navigate to Misplaced Pages from a web page, and then do the search or navigation. It is a temporary change, and then you put it back to your preferred web-search engine.

You can just drag items on the page the name up to the web browser search box while on any web site, even in the lower sections of a Misplaced Pages page, where no search box is immediately available.

You can reach all twelve sister projects the same way by using interwiki prefixes in the web browser's search box. For example, you can go straight to a Wiktionary entry by using the prefix wikt: from your web-search box.

SQL searches / Quarry

The entire[REDACTED] database (with some redactions for privacy) is exposed for SQL queries at the experimental Quarry service. Using this requires a high degree of technical skill; you must not only know SQL, but also be able to navigate the complex (and not always well documented) database schema. For those who are so equipped, it may provide another option for searches which would be impossible to do via the standard search interface.

Other search tools

Other search tools include:

• Your own browser, to search the current page only. Try Ctrl+F, F3, or ⌘ Command+F.
• https://www.wikipedia.org, to search other language editions of Misplaced Pages.
• Search-related templates See the navigation box below.)

Internal search tools:

• ISBN
• Prefix
• And many other SpecialPages

External tools dedicated to Misplaced Pages Database searches include:

• Article title grep: searches page titles using regular expressions. This search is much slower than standard search. In particular this tool can search for exact strings of characters, including punctuation and with case sensitivity. For example the pattern \(& Co\. Ltd\. will find only titles containing (& Co. Ltd. exactly as shown. Regular expressions are precisely defined, and not intuitively obvious.
• PetScan: about 20 search parameters, three for categories
• WikiBlame: search for text in the revision history of a page
• User Contribution Search: reports anyone's contributions to a page
• Edit summary search: search for text in anyone's edit summaries
• whichsub: finds transcluded templates of a given page which contain a given string.

If you cannot find what you are looking for

If you're looking for a place where wine comes from pronounced "Bordo", you can try searching for a more general article such as "Wine", "Wine regions" (returning "List of wine-producing regions") or other wine types such as "Burgundy" and see if it's mentioned there or follow links (in this case, to "Burgundy wine", which has several mentions of "Bordeaux", and links to "French wine" and "Bordeaux wine"). If you know it's in France, look at "France" or the Category:Cities in France, from where you can easily find Bordeaux. You can try various things depending upon the particular case; for "Bordo" wine, it's quite likely that the first letters are "bord", so search an article you've landed on for these letters. If you use Google to search Misplaced Pages, and click on "cache" at the bottom of any result in the search engine results page, you'll see the word(s) that you searched for highlighted in context.

(For an overview of how to find and navigate Misplaced Pages content, see Misplaced Pages:Contents. If you're looking for a straight definition of a word, try our sister project Wiktionary.)

If there is no appropriate page on Misplaced Pages, consider creating a page, since you can edit Misplaced Pages right now. Or consider adding what you were looking for to the Requested articles page.

If you have a question, then see Where to ask questions, which is a list of departments where our volunteers answer questions, any question you can possibly imagine.

A common mistake is to type a natural-language question into the search box and expect an answer. While some Web search tools support this, the Misplaced Pages search is a text search only; questions, as such, can be asked at the reference desk and similar places. A search for how do clocks work? will return articles with the words how, do, clocks, and work, ignoring the question mark (in practice this can lead to articles answering simple questions).

Delay in updating the search index

Because people like to see their work in search results, the search engine attempts to update in near real-time. Edits made to pages via templates can take a little longer to propagate. If you see the index lagging more than a day or so, report it. For other technical issues with the search engine, please leave a message on the talk page.

Under the hood

To power its search feature, Misplaced Pages uses CirrusSearch, a MediaWiki extension that uses Elasticsearch to provide enhanced search features.

Stem matching

• H:STEM

Search results will include the roots of words included in the search string, and their various tenses (plural, past-tense, etc.). If stem matching is not wanted, use double quotes around the word or phrase you want to match verbatim. Here are some examples:

Custom search boxes

• H:CSB

Custom search boxes are made by <inputbox> tags. See mw:Extension:InputBox for more information.

Content namespaces

Content namespaces are intended for use by readers as part of the encyclopedia.

Administrative namespaces

Administrative namespaces are intended for use by editors or by automated tools for the administration and governance of the encyclopedia.

See also

• Help:Navigation § Using the search box to navigate
• Help:Searching from a web browser
• Help:Searching/Features
• Help:Searching/feedback
• MediaWiki:Help:Searching
• MediaWiki:Search
• mw:Help:CirrusSearch
  • mw:Help:Extension:WikibaseCirrusSearch
• Misplaced Pages:Search engine test
• Misplaced Pages:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts § Search
  • SearchSuite
• Misplaced Pages:Overreliance upon Google
• Misplaced Pages:Article name search
• Misplaced Pages:External search engines
• Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style/List of talk page search boxes
• Misplaced Pages:United States government document search tools
• Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/coordinates search tool
• Misplaced Pages:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Google search
• Misplaced Pages:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Multi-NS search
• Misplaced Pages:Reference desk: Ask a question here and Misplaced Pages volunteers will try to answer it
• phab:T204089 – why you can't specifically include or exclude redirects from your search results

The alternative to searching = browsing a.k.a.: looking it up

• Misplaced Pages:Editor's index to Misplaced Pages – an enormous list of the Misplaced Pages community, intended to help find anything not in the encyclopedia itself.

Advanced search methods

• Help:Searching/Regex
• Help:Searching/Regex/Sandboxing
• Misplaced Pages:Tools § Searching
• Misplaced Pages:User scripts/List § Search
• Misplaced Pages:Advanced source searching
• Misplaced Pages:External search engines
• Help:Linksearch – to search external links (url's)
• Misplaced Pages:PetScan
• Misplaced Pages:AutoWikiBrowser/Database Scanner

Notes

1. ^ See Phabricator task T107947 for an explanation.
2. The upper-cased All: was previously documented as distinct from all:, in doing such namespace sorting while the lower-case version did not. But as of 2024, All: is no longer functional, and tends to produce unexpected results (e.g. no matches, or those containing the word all).
3. Because the default search domain is a settable preference, any query you intend to share, publish, or save in a search link might need the search domain explicitly given in the search link in order to ensure consistent search results among all users, at any time. {{Search link}} defaults to article space but can specify multiple namespaces in its query.

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