I'd just like to second this request, as someone who has also edited in the space of linguistics articles and been frustrated by this gap in functionality.

Seems like this was fixed? The wikipedia search help page includes an example with a negated hastemplate filter, and it works as expected.

BTW, another thing that makes the current state of affairs feel confusing and inconsistent is that the prefix: operator doesn't apply to redirects, only the actual title.

I'm not sure if this exactly matches the use case described, but another user and I recently created a toolforge tool with the specialized purpose of searching by title. A couple of the features mentioned in this issue were explicit design goals:

• Sparse presentation of results so that many can fit on the screen at once (no snippets, or metadata other than the title)
• Easy comparison of results for different title queries (you can compare 2 or more queries in side-by-side panes)
• Optionally excluding results that only match on a redirect rather than the actual title

In terms of the API, there used to be a boolean srredirects parameter, which would include redirects if true. Restoring that seems fine to me. Though it looks like the default value for boolean parameters is always false (https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=main#main/datatypes), so maybe it would be preferable to keep the current default behaviour, and add a boolean param with opposite semantics (srnoredirects? srsuppressredirects?).

A valuable use case for title search would be looking at the number of titles matching certain patterns, to establish whether there's a consistent form in use for certain types of articles (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CONSISTENCY). For example, comparing the parenthetical disambiguators "(video games)" vs. "(video gaming)". The inability to exclude redirects makes this impossible.

I've noticed the same thing. FWIW, it seems to only happen with some instances. For example, the linked Five Little Ducks example fails consistently for me, but replaying the example at the top of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence consistently works.