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Improved search, and WMF data scientist tells all

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By Evad37

Sister projects in search results

Sister project search results for "Brazil"

When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. They appear next to the search results. By introducing this feature, the Discovery department hopes to provide visitors with additional information, and reduce the likelihood of searches returning zero results. This also raises the visibility of sister projects, and may encourage visitors to explore these projects further, and potentially contribute to them. Some communities have already had similar functionality via custom JavaScript.

On English Wikipedia, a Village Pump RfC was held to determine which sister projects should be included. There were concerns that "content returned by some projects is too often irrelevant, problematic, outdated, spammy, or in some other way contradictory to the aims and purposes of [English Wikipedia] and not really what we want to send our readers to". The RfC resulted in the following projects being approved:

Commons multimedia, Wikinews, and Wikiversity results will not be shown. Wikidata and Wikispecies are not within the scope of this feature.

Results from Wikibooks are also currently displayed, in contrast to the RfC closure; a Phabricator task has been opened requesting their suppression.

Since the feature was enabled, there have been multiple requests for an opt-out option. A way to collapse the sister project results was suggested on a Village pump (technical) thread:

Here's a quick snippet you can add to your common.js to make it collapsible and collapsed by default:

	if ( mw.config.get( 'wgCanonicalSpecialPageName' ) === 'Search' ) {
		$.when(
			mw.loader.using( 'jquery.makeCollapsible' ),
			$.ready
		).done( function () {
			var $mwInterwikiResults = $( '#mw-interwiki-results' );
			
			$mwInterwikiResults.addClass( 'mw-collapsible mw-collapsed' )
				.find( '.iw-results' ).addClass( 'mw-collapsible-content' );
			$mwInterwikiResults.makeCollapsible();
		} );
	}


— User:Murph9000

While at a Village pump (proposals) discussion, code to remove those results was posted:

just add

div#mw-interwiki-results { display: none !important }

to your own common.css.
— User:Nemo bis

WMF data scientist answers the Internet's questions

Aaron Halfaker

Aaron Halfaker (User:EpochFail), a data scientist with WMF, conducted an Ask Me Anything session with Reddit contributors on 1 June (UTC). The question-and-answer session attracted 118 comments and covered Halfaker's ORES AI-based antivandal project and AI construction in general, Wikipedia editing for wider audiences, Reddit, and AIs for content generation, including automatic summarization for unseen Twin Peaks episodes. B.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

Newly approved bot tasks

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2017 #24 & #25. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Installation code

  1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js' ); // Backlink: User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js
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The errors messages I'm getting when I try to add the suggested code above to my commons.css suggest that it should be just: #mw-interwiki-results { display: none }. - Dank (push to talk) 13:59, 23 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I created a new RfC to settle the Wikibooks issue. Feel free to express your opinion there. Kaldari (talk) 21:59, 23 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Why are results from Wikidata excluded? It adds real value to the search results. Often the results of Magnus's search extension are of higher quality that currently provided. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:44, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Add all the search results you like, as long as "#mw-interwiki-results { display: none }" works (and more visible ways to turn it off would be better). - Dank (push to talk) 11:56, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]



       

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