Talk:Decision (Blake's 7 story)
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Does this page, then, need a line at the top that says you may be looking for articles called "The Decision" and "Decisions"? Or list each of the six or so other very similar pages that are on Fanlore now with a specific title? Because that feels like a ton of work, something that is impossible to update on each page with new similar title additions, besides being really ungainly/messy. --Mrs. Potato Head (talk) 03:54, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
- Someone who´s unsure of the exact title of what they´re looking for could use the search option (instead of "go") and find a number of options, so I don´t think it´s an issue. --Tiyire (talk) 23:53, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
- I agree that often works, but I don't think that a lot of people understand the difference between the two commands. Maybe it's just me, but I think of "The Decision," "Decision," and "Decisions" as all the same title, especially with the search engine we have that puts so much weight on "The," as well as not being very intuitive. --Mrs. Potato Head (talk) 00:15, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
- Most users have been 'trained' by Google on how to search. Fanlore's search engine weights search terms differently (ex: The Decision gives you a different result than just Decision or even Decisions), I'd lean towards adopting a user friendly method that will be easy for us to manage with minimal effort. We ran into something similar early on when we were naming zines by putting authors/fandoms in the titles - it made it harder to find the zines that way and it was not how users looked for zines so we dropped it and used just the zine title. And last, most users do not see the different Go vs Search boxes - it is the one 'feature' that I have to consistently point out to new editors. So I'd go with MPH's suggestion for now--MeeDee (talk) 04:03, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
- Is there a way to change the "Go" and "Search" boxes to "Search by Exact Title" and "Search by Keyword"? Is there a way to make the search engine ignore "The" and "A" at the beginning of a title? Is there a way to make the search engine respect a search in quotes, the way Google does? --Mrs. Potato Head (talk) 13:41, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
- I have no idea, but I'll ask. Currently the two boxes have hovertext descriptions--Tiyire (talk) 19:28, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
- If you edit MediaWiki:Searcharticle, it will change the text on the Go button. MediaWiki:Searchbutton does the same for Search. It can also be set to look the way it does on Wikipedia, where there are no buttons and it's just a magnifying glass icon.
- The search treats quotation marks as "I want the words in exactly this order", rather than "I want exactly these words in exactly this order" the way Google does. I don't know of an easy way to change that, but it does indeed appear to be possible to tell it to ignore "the" and "a" (not sure about having it do so just in titles, though).
- There is an autocomplete feature that would potentially make this less of an issue. I don't remember if there was some problem with it that made me not enable it before, but I'll look into it again.
- Disambiguation is messy in general: Wikipedia spends a lot of digital ink giving guidance (which may or may not be useful for your purposes). Emufarmers (talk) 10:59, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
- Thank you, Emufarmers, for looking into these topics. Maybe there can be some tweaks? I'll look at Wikipedia's page on disambiguation, though it's possible it may make my head explode ;). --Mrs. Potato Head (talk) 15:48, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
- Is there a way to change the "Go" and "Search" boxes to "Search by Exact Title" and "Search by Keyword"? Is there a way to make the search engine ignore "The" and "A" at the beginning of a title? Is there a way to make the search engine respect a search in quotes, the way Google does? --Mrs. Potato Head (talk) 13:41, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
- Most users have been 'trained' by Google on how to search. Fanlore's search engine weights search terms differently (ex: The Decision gives you a different result than just Decision or even Decisions), I'd lean towards adopting a user friendly method that will be easy for us to manage with minimal effort. We ran into something similar early on when we were naming zines by putting authors/fandoms in the titles - it made it harder to find the zines that way and it was not how users looked for zines so we dropped it and used just the zine title. And last, most users do not see the different Go vs Search boxes - it is the one 'feature' that I have to consistently point out to new editors. So I'd go with MPH's suggestion for now--MeeDee (talk) 04:03, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
- I agree that often works, but I don't think that a lot of people understand the difference between the two commands. Maybe it's just me, but I think of "The Decision," "Decision," and "Decisions" as all the same title, especially with the search engine we have that puts so much weight on "The," as well as not being very intuitive. --Mrs. Potato Head (talk) 00:15, 15 February 2014 (UTC)