Last modified: 2008-08-26 20:18:18 UTC
1.) Go to [[Wikipedia:Red link]] on en.wikipedia.org 2.) Click on [[George W. Buah]] 3.) Click on "search" (for an existing article) in the top box. 4.) Note that "George_W._Buah" shows up in the search bar. If you simply type "George W. Buah" into the "search" box on the left-hand side, "George W. Buah" (spaces not underscores) shows up in the search box. The presence of underscores causes search failures if you switch "MediaWiki search" to "Google" and try again. The above four-step procedure should result in spaces (using "+" instead of "_" in the URL) to prevent this.
The search link in English Wikipedia's "article doesn't exist" template uses the Special:Search/$1 format, appending the search term to the internal special page title. This merges underscores and spaces together to where they can't be disambiguated from the input. Previously, Special:Search was taking that parameter straight with the underscores; but most of the time it will be more correct to use the text form here (with spaces). I've gone ahead and fixed this in r40043. Fix should go live on the site within a day or so.
