Last modified: 2008-12-28 21:31:04 UTC
I suggest to create a special page listing the names of wiki pages that users tried to find without success, e.g. like this: 1st occurrence__last occurrence__tries _ title _ 2003-nov-11 ___ 2006-nov-22 ___ 8114 _ John Walter Bush (create) _ 2005-aug-22 ___ 2005-dec-31 ____ 114 _ Christmess (create) _ 2004-jan-16 ___ 2006-apr-17 ______ 5 _ Wheelchair (create) See also bug 5466 Obviously the benefit of such a page would be to: * determine public demand for specific pages / keywords under circumstances, where users cannot be expected to type their wishes in a "suggested new pages" wishlist, * identify most common spelling errors or spelling variants so as to create redirects for them, or pages saying: "Did you mean [[John Walker Bush]]?" e.g. * etc. Additionally, I'd suggest to have: 0) this page made optional, or an extension only, 1) an installation parameter + code limiting the size of a table collecting such data to something reasonable, aging and finally dropping seldomly reoccurring items. 2) permit Admins to exclude (and mynually drop) specific entries. 3) automatically delete entries for which pages were created (possibly after a given time during which page creation is documented in the list - (create) link removed / replaced by "created!", and title made a link)
I'd vie more in favour of a system whereby the search servers logged multiple failed search attempts, which could then be published as a set of statistics on a quarterly basis or so. This would ultimately allow us to analyse them for improvements to the search system (and upstream, the Lucene project might have some interest in it), and allow dedicated users to improve existing redirects, etc. for the more repetitive cases.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 6373 ***
