On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 2:03 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Would it be possible, and if so would it be desirable,
to provide links to
wiktionary for single-word searches? That might be a way to provide content
in the user's current language, when it isn't available on the current
wikipedia.
Desirable is a philosophical question, but it seems reasonable to me.
Possible certainly seems possible, if it helps. Once again, what we really
need to do is look through the data and see how often something that looks
like this comes up.
A few more ideas to toss on the pile, some of which have potential
philosophical implications. (Thanks to Moiz for inspiring these during a
recent chat.)
- "trending typos"—here's the philosophical bit—do we want/need to solve
all zero searches with improved search engine results, or are redirects
acceptable? If they are, we could publish a list of the top zero-results
searches and allow human editors to fix the ones that are obvious typos
with redirects. Célia Šašić comes to mind again. One announcer repeatedly
said her name like it was "Celia Sausage". I don't know if any generic
search engine technique is going to take care of that. If it was the top
zero-results query, though, a redirect from Celia Sausage to Célia Šašić
would be helpful.
Even if we don't like redirects, we could also try to map (possibly via
more computationally expensive techniques, permanently or temporarily) the
top-N most common zero-results queries to the top-P most common queries
(across search sessions)—similar to mapping typos to corrected typos
(within a search session). This would allow us to catch trending topics
that are hard to spell.
—Trey