Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Search/Preferences settings to modify crosswiki search results

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Preferences settings to modify crosswiki search results

  • Problem: This year, the crosswiki search results from other projects, like Wiktionary and Wikisource, are implemented throughout all language sites of Wikipedia. Reactions toward the implementation have varied. Before implementation, the en.WP community agreed in one discussion to suppress search results from Wikimedia Commons, Wikiversity, and Wikinews in en.WP. (Side note: Wikimedia Commons isn't fully suppressed; just the sidebar results as integrated results from Commons are still shown via including results from "File:" namespace, like this example.) (Another side note: Wikibooks was supposed to be suppressed, but a discussion resulting into "no consensus" led to... enabling Wikibooks in enWP, but that's a separate issue that can be raised at en.WP.)

    After implementation, some users wanted all sidebar search results from other projects suppressed. Consequently, the enWP community has been given per another discussion the "HideInterwikiSearchResults" gadget via Preferences settings to hide the results. Currently, 181+ editors use the gadget there.

    Edit: The team decided to sort Wiktionary as the top of the list of crosswiki results in all Wikipedia sites, while the team put Wikibooks at the very bottom in only English Wikipedia search results.

  • Who would benefit: Registered users throughout all projects (especially Wikipedia language sites) that have already implemented sidebar search results, including users who want to enable results from any project(s) and those wanting to disable results from any or all projects
  • Proposed solution: I propose two three solutions things as part of the solution:
    1. options to enable/opt-in or disable/opt-out a sidebar result from any individual project. For example, a individual user configure user settings to suppress results from one project but enable results from other projects.
    2. an option to disable/opt-out all sidebar search results from sister projects. (en.WP already has this option as a gadget)
    3. (if necessary) setting to sort the ordering of sidebar search results from sister projects.
  • More comments: Consensus at enWP regarding individual projects should be respected. In other words, if the proposal succeeds, Commons, Wikinews, and Wikiversity should be already opted-out by default setting, and signed-out users still won't see them. Therefore, for example, if a registered en.WP user wants to see images from Commons at the sidebar, the user must select an option to enable the image results via user settings.

    Almost forgot, user scripts to suppress crosswiki search results (i.e. sidebar search results from sister projects) are offered, especially for non-English Wikimedian users. IMHO, considering that more than 100+ en.WP users use the opting-out gadget, the custom user script would have risked creating/modifying bytes of 100+ user script subpages in en.WP.

Discussion[edit]

Minor note: including commons results in File: namespace searches predates sidebar sister project results by some time: we implemented it wayyyyyy back in 2013. This isn't a comment on the appropriateness of it, whether they should be included or not. Just a bit of historical data that this was happening long before people noticed it as a result of sister project searches :) 😂 (talk) 00:00, 10 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the Wikibooks situation, the notes on the Phabricator ticket explained why Wikibooks was not suppressed. Basically, the developers read the first RfC discussion and thought that consensus to exclude Wikibooks was not strong at all, contrary to the closer's comments. After they decided to not exclude Wikibooks (including it by default), the second RfC was held. Due to a no consensus result on that second RfC, Wikibooks stayed included and the ticket was declined and closed. A new ticket was supposed to be opened to put Wikibooks at the bottom of the sidebar. Ca2james (talk) 20:25, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It was already done, Ca2james (phab:T171803). George Ho (talk) 02:25, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]

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