The Marilyn Manson Wiki:Searching

From MansonWiki, the Marilyn Manson encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Searching MansonWiki

This article provides a detailed overview of MansonWiki's search feature, and instructions on using external search engines, such as Google, to find information.

Wikipedia search

Enter your keywords in the search box.

  • Go - (or Enter on keyboard) takes you to the article.
  • Search - returns a list of articles and additional search options.

Tips for effective searches

Go is case sensitive

The "go" function uses an algorithm to decide what page you're likely to be interested in, and this usually masks its case sensitivity - but not always. In the case of the first character in your search query, the initial letter will always be capitalized due to technical restrictions. This is usually noted at the head of articles sporting a title where the initial letter is not meant to be capitalized.

Avoid short and common words

If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about"), you may see many irrelevant results.

Wildcards

Be careful about limited wildcards, as they take a toll on the server. Wildcard characters can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in a string.

The asterisk (*) usually substitutes as a wildcard character for any zero or more characters, and the question mark (?) usually substitutes as a wildcard character for any one character, as in the CP/M, DOS, Microsoft Windows and POSIX (Unix) shells. (In Unix this is referred to as glob expansion.) In SQL, wildcard characters can be used in "LIKE" expressions; the percent sign (%) matches zero or more characters, and underscore (_) a single character. In many regular expression implementations, the period (.) is the wildcard character for a single character.

Words with special characters

In a search for a word with a diaeresis, such as Sint Odiliënberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "ë". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odiliënberg); in the second case it can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg. This is actually a bug that should be fixed -- the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent.

Words in single quotes

If a word appears in an article with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable, it is better to use double quotes in articles for which this problem does not arise.

An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore They Said That Hell's Not Hot can be found only by searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with 's is an exception in that it can be found also by searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.

Phrases in double quotes -- exact match only

A phrase can easily be found by enclosing it in double quotes.

Namespaces searched by default

The search only applies to the namespaces selected in the user's preferences. To search the other namespaces check or uncheck the tickboxes in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page. Depending on the browser, a box may still be checked from a previous search, but without being effective any longer! To make sure, uncheck and recheck it.

Searching the image namespace means searching the image descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the image description pages.

The source text is searched

The source text (what one sees in the edit box, also called wiki text) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, special characters (if ê is coded as ê it is found searching for ecirc), etc.

Delay in updating the search index

For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes are not always immediately taken into account in searches.