With wikidata, following the recent update, when text is pasted with leading spaces or a tab, the lookahead function used to be able to ignore the leading characters and focus on the text for its search. The chomp function has disappeared.
a simple example "
female given name
" is a text copy from the description field and it used to be able to be pasted into "instance of", and remove the superfluous spaces in its lookup. Ability lost.
| Subject | Repo | Branch | Lines +/- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add special case handling for some forms of IDs | mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase | master | +582 -3 |
as a comment, I believe that we also used to have a terminating chomp of trailing space as part of the lookahead function, and now the addition of a space is literal in lookahead. If that is purposeful behaviour, okay; if it is not, then maybe it can be looked at again.
There are benefits in either scheme in having a literal space, though if you have the space and don't identify that in the result, it can lead to thinking that a term does not exist and either creating it (as duplicate) or not linking an item.
Change 387025 had a related patch set uploaded (by Smalyshev; owner: Smalyshev):
[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Add special case handling for some forms of IDs
Change 387025 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Add special case handling for some forms of IDs