Last modified: 2014-06-12 16:35:08 UTC
We have lovely typeahead search suggestions for regular page names, and for raw Special: page names (eg if you "special:rec" and get shown "Special:RecentChanges" and "Special:RecentChangesLinked") but... What would come in quite handy for us power users would be if for special pages which are known to accept a page title as a slash-parameter, we could get typeahead suggestions for page titles! Eg, type "Special:Whatlinkshere/leb" and see: Special:WhatLinksHere/Lebanon Special:WhatLinksHere/Lebanese Civil War Special:WhatLinksHere/LeBron James etc. This would require special pages registering themselves as accepting titles as a parameter, as not all of them do. (And some take usernames or other special cases, which would need different support.)
If the special page specified more than a boolean "I accept page parameters", for instance relevant parts of an API request instead, we could have suggestions for Special:Code as well.
Change 125565 had a related patch set uploaded by Bartosz Dziewoński: [poc] Autocomplete special pages' subpages in search suggestions https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/125565
Change 125565 merged by jenkins-bot: Autocomplete special pages' subpages in search suggestions https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/125565
And so the foundations for this are laid! However, the only special pages which support this sort of autocompletion is Special:Watchlist (…/edit, etc.) and Special:Log (…/block, etc.). My patch originally also included a hacky implementation for Special:Contributions which was deemed unsalvageable. Somebody should probably file some sub-bugs to implement this in special pages where it would have any value. Contributions and Whatlinkshere (mentioned in comment 0) are two, what else?
