GIST Support WikiThis page explains a variety of ways to find pages that you are looking for, including the use of the Seach box, categories, and special pages.
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[edit] Browsing
The best places to start browsing pages are the...
- Main Page - includes organized links to content pages
- Special:Allpages - Alphabetic index of all pages. By default, it shows content pages in the main namespace. You can use the drop-down box to see all pages in other namespaces such as all User, images, and category pages. (Note that that a-z come after A-Z in the page ordering).
Some wiki's use the category feature to help organize content into different categories. If you see a category link at the bottom of a page you are viewing, you can click on the category title in the link and it will take you to a category page that lists other pages within the category.
You may also find these pages useful...
- Special:Specialpages - lists all "Special" pages
- Special:Imagelist - lists all files that have been uploaded
- Special:Newimages - shows thumbnails of uploaded images
- Special:Listusers - shows all registered users, whether or not they have added content to their user page. (Note: only user pages with content are included in All pages).
[edit] Searching
The best way to search for a page is to use the search box at the top of every page. There are two buttons next to the search box - the Go button and the Search button. Each one is described below.
[edit] Go button
The Go button takes you directly to the page whose name you entered into the search box. For example, if you type "Main Page" into the search box and click on the Go button it will take you to Main Page.
The Go button is designed to help you even if you don't remember the exact name of the page. For example, if you don't capitalize the correct letters (e.g., you type in "Main page") you will still be taken to Main Page. In rare situations where there are two different, but similar pages (e.g., "Main Page" and "Main page"), it will take you to the one that matches exactly with what you entered.
If the page you entered is not found, it will perform a typical full-text search (as if you had clicked on the Search button (as described below).
Pressing the [Enter] key while the search field is active is equivalent to clicking on the Go button.
[edit] Search button
The Search button performs a page title and a full-text search. After clicking on the button, a search results page appears. It first shows all pages with the search terms in the page title. Next, it shows all pages that have the search terms anywhere in the page text. You can customize the look of the search results page by changing your preferences.
[edit] Searching detailed explanation (advanced)
[edit] The wikitext is searched
The wikitext (source text, what one sees in the edit box) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, special characters (if ê is coded as ê it is found searching for ecirc), etc.
[edit] Short and common words
Searching for short and common words is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all pages, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.
[edit] Search is case-insensitive
The searches for "fortran", "Fortran" and "FORTRAN" all return the same results.
[edit] Words with special characters
In a search for a word with a diaeresis, such as Sint Odiliënberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "ë". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odiliënberg); in the second case it can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg. This is actually a bug that should be fixed -- the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent.
[edit] Special search characters and phrases
You cannot use regular expressions or wildcards such as ? or *. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it. To search for pages with the words "boat" or "boats" you would enter: boat or boats. Likewise, there is no way to search for a phrase (i.e., by including the phrase in double quotes). So, searching for "can of tuna" will retrieve all pages containing "of" "tuna" and "can".
[edit] Words in single quotes
If a word appears in a page with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable it is better to use double quotes in pages, for which this problem does not arise.
An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe s is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.
[edit] Delay in updating the search index
For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes to pages are not always immediately taken into account in searches.
[edit] Search Options
[edit] Namespaces searched
The search only applies to the namespaces selected in the preferences. To search the other namespaces check or uncheck the checkboxes in the "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of the search results page. Depending on the browser, a box may still be checked from a previous search, but may no longer be effective. To be sure the box is in effect, uncheck and recheck it.
Searching the image namespace means searching the image descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the image pages. For searching the titles, use Special:Imagelist.
[edit] Redirects can be excluded
Check or uncheck the checkbox "List redirects" in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page.
[edit] Highlighting
Some portions of matching pages that contain the searched-for terms are shown, with the terms highlighted in red. You can set the number of lines extracted and the amount of text per line shown in your preferences.
If you search e.g. for "book" you get only pages with that word, not pages with "books" only. However, on pages with "book" and "books", also the part "book" of the word "books" is highlighted.