Last modified: 2010-05-15 16:03:52 UTC
Please provide a $wg... configuration setting, or a user preference, to make the AJAX autosuggest feature case-insensitive. Right now it is case-sensitive, which can mislead users into believing there is no match for a title, when in fact, they have just typed it in lowercase and there is an uppercase match. Search is case-insensitive. Therefore, auto-suggest should be case-insensitive too, at least optionally. Thanks.
This is provided by TitleKey extension and ties into general exact- and prefix/suggestion match searches ('go' search, opensearch suggest, ajax search, mwsuggest).
Sorry, TitleKey does not solve this problem; I just verified on MW 1.13 release candidate 1. Case Study: 0. Install MediaWiki 1.13 release candidate 1 with no other extensions. 1. Create a wiki article called "McGee" 2. Install TitleKey from svn, run "php rebuildTitleKeys.php" 3. In LocalSettings.php, add: $wgEnableMWSuggest = true; require_once("$IP/extensions/TitleKey/TitleKey.php"); Verify on Special:Version that the extension is installed. 4. Watch what happens when we type various things: You type: Autosuggest contains "McGee"? ================================================= Mcg yes mcg NO mcge yes mc NO Mc NO MC yes ?!? In each of the "NO" cases, there are other autosuggest results, but McGee is not present among them. 5. Now disable TitleKey and repeat the previous tests. The results are exactly the same. TitleKey seems to be having no effect whatsoever on the results. Every single "NO" result will mislead users that "McGee" doesn't exist. It's better to have no autosuggest at all, rather than a wrong autosuggest list.
Works fine on my local installation and on Wikipedia.
Could the difference be related to the choice of Lucene vs. mySQL-full-text search? Also I'm running on Windows 2003 Server, if that could be responsible for the different behavior. Speaking of extension behavior, Brion, could you please describe -- either here or at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TitleKey -- the exact, user-visible effect of TitleKey? All the wiki page says is, "case-insensitive title prefix search" but does not describe the effect beyond that. What should it do when it interacts with autosuggest, etc?
I think I understand what's happening here... Autosuggest displays only a *subset* of matches, perhaps the first 10 or so. That means if McGee isn't in the first 10, it's not being displayed. Not the behavior I expected, and it can be misleading (i.e., I was certainly misled). But with millions of articles on Wikipedia, I see why limiting the number of suggestions makes sense.
