Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Categories/Case insensitive category search

Random proposal ►◄ Categories  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Case insensitive category search

• Problem: When adding or editing content categories for an article using Visual Editor, the search is case sensitive. It is also sensitive to spellings from different dialects, e.g. Non-profit organizations vs. Non-profit organisations. This makes it hard to find and discover existing categories, especially when it comes to improving categorisation and adding categories to pages without any.
• Who would benefit: All editors.
• Proposed solution: Make the category selection search query case and dialect insensitive.
• More comments:
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: WikiVillager (talk) 11:24, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

• @WikiVillager: "When adding or editing content categories for an article". There are multiple places and methods (4 editing toolbars, wikitext, HotCat) in which you can do that. Can you specify the one where you encountered the case sensitivity problem ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:57, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
• @TheDJ: Sure - I click on Edit on a page > am in Visual editing mode > click on the Page options icon to the left of Publish changes... in the top right corner > click on Categories —WikiVillager (talk) 22:06, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

  Ok. so what this sounds like to me, is that you don't want an autocomplete suggestion, but a search based functionality backed by the searchengine, which can ignore accents and case, find partial matches (match on presence of a word somewhere inside a long category name), fuzzy matching (spelling mistakes) etc. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:53, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

• down with case-sensitivity —Cramyourspam (talk) 15:02, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
• Sensitive is significant in Wiktionary, this change have to be project-specific. Also, "spelling from different dialects" seems very English-centric, isn't it? Noé (talk) 22:12, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
• I noticed that this also happens with punctuation - e.g. typing "21st century composers" will not return anything due to the missing hyphen between "21st" and "century", which isn't the most user or beginner friendly. —WikiVillager (talk) 23:58, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
• To ease navigation of the Editing category, I'm going to move this to the Categories category (yes a Category about categories!). Hope this okay, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 00:46, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Voting

•  Support I know that feeling, it is so annoying. I hope this feature gets implemented. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 11:13, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support making the search engine more flexible is a good idea in order to enhance discovery of content by users Clarinetjo (talk) 12:02, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support see comment on search for similar categories e.g. 'women' also bring up 'female' Kaybeesquared (talk) 13:36, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Mmoe (talk) 16:45, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support JPxG (talk) 05:45, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Nonahg (talk) 08:49, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support β₁₆ - (talk) 13:19, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Libcub (talk) 18:35, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support NaBUru38 (talk) 20:23, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Izno (talk) 15:11, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Фред-Продавец звёзд (talk) 19:19, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Fixer88 (talk) 08:59, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support --FocalPoint (talk) 16:23, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support I find it really hard to attach categories because of this issue, hope this passes. Ziad Rashad (talk) 17:48, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

  Oh please, I think I could have possibly added a dozen categories to pages if the search wasn't so canse sensitive. Ziad Rashad (talk) 18:39, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

•  Support Tango Mike Bravo (talk) 16:01, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support -- the wub "?!" 18:26, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Tgr (talk) 06:56, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support WeHaKa (talk) 23:26, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Jurbop (talk) 07:25, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Baum64 (talk) 12:04, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 12:54, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support GiFontenelle (talk) 18:40, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Bgrus22 (talk) 21:59, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
•  SupportGoombiis (talk) 08:26, 21 December 2020 (UTC)