Last modified: 2009-05-29 09:48:40 UTC
In all Wikimedia projects I have tested, it is possible to use wildcards (*) in searches and get results when not logged in. But if I log in and do the same searches, I get results on some projects (English Wiktionary, Dutch Wikipedia, and Swedish Wikisource), but in others (English and Swedish Wikipedias) I see the MediaWiki:Lucenefallback message and get no results.
Lucene doesn't let you do wildcard queries over split indexes (at least not out of the box). When you are logged in, you probably have more than one namespace (apart from the main) in you default search, and since indexes are split main+rest, it needs to search more than one index. So, this affects only large wikis that have split indexes and users that try to do wildcard searches on more than one namespace, but still I guess that our wildcard support needs to be reworked.
The default is probably to search multiple namespaces in most cases (eg, articles and images, or articles and categories, etc), so that needs to actually work I think. :)
From what I've seen in the logs, around 99.5% of queries are in the wiki's default-search namespace, so I split the index conveniently according to this (i.e. main+rest for 10 largest wikis, with exception of es.wiki), others are just single index file so there is no problem. But then again, i guess that those 0.5% users are most likely to use wildcard queries and complain about it... If this is a sought-after feature (as it seems), I could also try to make it work with arbitrary wildcard queries (i.e. for suffixes as well) ..
Mass close WONTFIX open Lucene Search issues because extension Lucene Search was removed, and replaced by MWSearch. Please set to REOPENED if behaviour still exists with a another component, and update the domain.
Mass REOPEN after discussion with Robert. Domain: Wikimedia/lucene-search-2. Assigned to maintainer.
Been fixed for a while...
