User talk:CKoerner (WMF)/Interwiki Searches

Looks good, if any prototypes are available for possible future solutions or scenarios to think about, it would make it easier to visualize.--Melamrawy (WMF) (talk) 22:24, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Definitely check out the "Existing Examples" section. The Italian Wikipedia has been doing cross-wiki searching for themselves for a while. TJones (WMF) (talk) 18:28, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Assumption

"Searching for "Paris, France" and seeing generally the same article in French, German, and English wouldn't help much in discovering new information". I haven't checked whether this is the case with Paris, but it is a fact that articles' content can vary, even a lot, among the various languages; almost always they are not a mere translation of (say) the English one. Knowing that I will find different content (sometimes culturally nuanced, so to say) is the reason why I visit multiple other wiki sites in the first place, and this is particularly true for me for sister sites like Wikivoyage. (Too bad we actually don't have a way, AFAIK, to "measure" or display how different articles are - not just in length terms, that is. Maybe the search results may somehow highlight this?). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:38, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

I believe the proposal was to not do cross-language searching. Chris, maybe that should be a little clearer? It would be interesting to try to measure differences in article quality across languages (though not for this project). Length is a decent and very easy measure. We have some automated article quality tools, too, which could help. TJones (WMF) (talk) 18:28, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

My comment doesn't seem to make much sense, now that I read it again (I mean, I think it does in regard to the general assumption behind it, not in regard to what is reasonable/makes sense to expect from search results). I see you're addressing cross-language issues already. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:53, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Future home

I think this should be moved to a new page along with Jan's sub page. Here are my proposals. Feel free to argue semantics. :)

Main page

• Current: User:CKoerner (WMF)/Interwiki Searches
• New: Cross-wiki Search Improvements

Design page

• Current: User:JDrewniak (WMF)/SERP Design
• News: Cross-wiki Search Improvements/Design

I think 'cross-wiki' is a little easier to translate and understand that inter-wiki (the whole intranet/internet thing is confusing). I also think that SERP is a bit of jargon we can make simpler. While most of the Product department has their documentation on MediaWiki.org, this is a significant change that will involved multi-project input. I argue that it should remain here on Meta for more visibility.

Does anyone have additional suggestions or strong opinions against these ideas? CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 21:49, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Is cross-wiki as established (and hence translated) in the Wikimedian jargon as interwiki is? I am partial to mw.org, because it definitely has more visibility there (our movement + 3rd parties ;) ). Luckily we have redirects, in case. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:40, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

Cross-wiki makes a bit more sense - I think - in a real world scenario, because these new search results will be gathered across projects of the same language. I think the intra- or inter- usage would create too much confusion as far as what do we really mean (in regards to the new search results and how we're gathering them). I also prefer mediawiki for this document, as the vast majority of other Discovery product documentation is there already and keeping it together is a good thing, IMHO. Redirects for the win! ;) deb (talk) 15:18, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

I think both terms have a historical meaning in Wikimedia. Cross-wiki notifications, and interwiki links are both existing terms. In casual conversation between people, I think "cross-wiki" would be more approachable. I'll move the pages to MediaWiki.org and soon and update the language to reflect 'cross-wiki'. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 21:55, 31 August 2016 (UTC)