I would love to help with this. I know @LukeStrickland is working on making the wiki better and easier.
It would help if I could get several example searches and expected results.
.
Here is one:
There is a page called Rooms Guide. The first heading says âClassrooms Guideâ. It has comments embedded that say classroom several ways, several times. Searching for this using the phrase âclassroomâ or âClassroomâ or âClass Roomâ all return fairly poor results (Not in the first page). By contrast, searching using google: âclassrooms site:dallasmakerspace.org/wikiâ and it is the 6th return.
Here is a discussion of this topic:
It includes (or links to) this example:
search for any financial form, of which you know the file name, e.g. âFORM : Dallas Makerspace Receipt of Saleâ and nothing will be found, even if you use the file search.
There may be others gleaned from that discussion as well.
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@John_Marlow why was my post moved along with these? It wasnât about the search, but the fact that the committee wide rules are not on the wiki (the original topic)âŚ
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We desperately need to improve the wiki. I have some observations. I think they are credible because I spend a lot of time maintaining the wiki. They are not intended to be complaints.
The editor that Luke has made available makes it easier for people to maintain page-specific content. While thatâs clearly important, IMO we have bigger issues with search and structure. The new editor isnât going to fix those.
Somewhere I saw a list of how wiki prioritizes searches. I canât find it now, but the gist of it is this:
- Page names
- Heading names
- Page text
You have to know an exact text string to search effectively. Hereâs an example. I created a page called Rooms Guide. It lists the sizes and capacities of all the classrooms so people can choose where to schedule their classes. If you search âRooms Guideâ youâll get a hit. If you search âRooms listâ it offers to let you create a page. Same thing if you search for âClassrooms listâ. If you search âroom capacityâ, itâs the 15th hit. And if someone talked about rooms a lot on a Board meeting, for instance, that page would show up high in the list also.
There is a separate way to browse a category. I donât know how many people know how to do this, because it isnât attached to Search. However, if people are diligent about including the category name on their page, then it should show these pages. Letâs choose Machine shop. You could go to âBrowse the wikiâ, and click on Machine shop. It will list the pages that are categorized as machine shop. But unless the words âMachine Shopâ are included in the headers or repeatedly in the page text, those pages may not show up using âmachine shopâ as a text search. And continuing on with âmachine shopâ, as I user I would prefer to see anything in the machine shop category prioritized above anything thatâs not in the machine shop category. That doesnât happen. If, for instance, there is a Board meeting where machine shop appears repeatedly in the minutes, that page will appear at the top of the search list.
There is a huge list of pages that have no category attached. If you go to the link Other ways you can help (buried at the bottom RH corner of the main wiki page), you can see find links to see uncategorized pages, pages in the Cleanup Category and pages that are short on content. I stumbled across this by accident and I suspect most people donât know itâs there.
Iâm sure thereâs also a way to find pages that arenât linked to anything. An orphan page has limited usefulness and most people will never be able to find it.
Next on my list is structure. At the dawn of time, when there were a couple dozen members and DMS acted like a club, the wiki was started. The only categories that people envisioned were Meetings, Rules and Bylaws, Projects (which is now mostly unused), Committees / Groups, and Tools. (New Member 411 appears in the main page links, but it is not a category).
Everything else gets lumped into the DMS general category [[Category:Dallas Makerspace]].
Now there is a need for standard operating procedures and business practices as a category. There might be a need for a category related to membership issues, processes, and questions. These process-related things are, IMO, the hardest to find. They donât tend to have specific page titles, they donât have a category, and youâd have to guess the exact wording to get a good search. But they are important to a wide swath of members. If we create those categories we need to re-categorize anything existing that is relevant.
The Tools page is one of the most useful things on the wiki. Itâs an overview page that everyone can find. A lot of relevant information is linked to it and from it and although itâs not entirely up to date, I think it does help out. I wonder if there is some type of similar DMS-level table (without pictures) that could perform a similar function ⌠sort of like a high-level table of contents all in one place?
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Very sorry. I read the last paragraph. Iâll move it back to the original place. [EDIT: I have moved it. Again, sorry for the mistake.]
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I am not seeing that.
For âRooms listâ
https://dallasmakerspace.org/w/index.php?search=Rooms+list&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go
For âClassroom listâ
https://dallasmakerspace.org/w/index.php?search=Classroom+list&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go
We might look into using one of the MediaWiki extensions and replace the search with a better one.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Search_extensions
I have heard that SphinxSearch is good
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Last updated in 2014âŚ
Iâd start here, myself.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Search_Platform
and, realizing my opinion is worth just what is paid, the Elastica platform appears to be âthe thingâ at the momentâŚ
That is just the extension not the search.
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Interesting. Do we see different things when we search?
Clicking on your links âŚ
I donât know if everyone gets the option to create a new page, but my real point was that it doesnât return anything useful near the top part of the search.
Being logged in makes the difference on whether it proffers a âcreate new pageâ link.
What we could do is setup several copies of the wiki somewhere with different search engines installed and then try them all out.
Or maybe you can have more than one search engine installed?
This way we can compare
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Thanks for the link. I added this to the wiki section about how to improve the wiki.
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We use ElasticSearch at work, seems very nice.
I figure we should just test the ones we want and see how they work? Any objections?
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I wish the wiki would notify me of changes to pages on my watchlist. Instead it is up to me to go check my watchlist online. Every day, if need be. The auto-notification would be a great way to push critical changes to our Laser users.
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I think weâre just missing an email configuration in our wiki settings.
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Itâs an easy fix? That would be a game changer in terms of keeping our users up to date.
(tries not to get too excited or hopeful, but itâs a struggle!)
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