Last modified: 2013-03-26 11:25:09 UTC
On fr.wiktionary.org, there is a Utilisateur:SniperMaské page (http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Utilisateur:SniperMask%C3%A9), but if I search just the ''Utilisateur'' (a.k.a. ''User'') namespace for ''Sniper, SniperM, SniperMa, SniperMas'' or ''SniperMask'', I find essentially nothing : http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sp%C3%A9cial:Recherche/Sniper?title=Sp%C3%A9cial%3ARecherche&redirs=0&search=Sniper&fulltext=Search&ns2=1&title=Sp%C3%A9cial%3ARecherche&advanced=1&fulltext=Advanced+search Note that ''SniperMa'' through ''SniperMask'' suggest the right page, but ''SniperM'' has no suggestions at all. I get the impression the suggestion will be offered only if 3 characters or less are missing from the trailing end (try it with ''Mglovesfun'', ''Urhixidur'', and ''Lmaltier'', for instance). I could live with no suggestions, but only if there were some hits reported! I presume this is a Lucene Search problem; do correct me if I'm wrong.
Only whole words are searched, if we searched for all partial matches that would give too many false results (i.e. imagine searching for "s", it would give pretty much any page on the wiki). You probably want to search for Sniper* (notice the asterisk on the end), that will match anything that starts with Sniper.
I had not realised that regular expressions were supported. Good to know. Is there a user's documentation anywhere? All I seem to get from looking around are technical specs from a programmer's point of view...
As far as I know the most complete documentation is on en.wp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching
[Merging "MediaWiki extensions/Lucene Search" into "Wikimedia/lucene-search2", see bug 46542. You can filter bugmail for: search-component-merge-20130326 ]
