Shortcuts are the titles of mainspace, redirect pages. They're dressed up to look like namespaces, i.e. pseudo-namespaces, e.g. MOS: for popular Manual of Style references and H: for popular Help references, like H:S for Help:Searching, but shortcuts are not in any namespace. Although shortcuts target project space, they are pagenames in article space.

Currently the ElasticSearch schema is structured as if shortcut pagenames were found in project namespace, when in reality project namespace is just the target. As a consequence users currently get no hints for accessing maintenance docs.

For more background info:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Shortcut
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Namespace#Pseudo-namespaces
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Search_autosuggestions_or_typeahead.09are_not_reliable

This task seems easy, and fixes a serious maintenance problem.

Wikipedia Operations & Maintenance pages are now "off the radar".

As the removal of a former, working tool, it affects experienced users.

As a factual avenue of curiosity, it affects new users.

This bug, if left untreated, will eventually hamper, at some point, all users efforts to improve the encyclopedia.

The lead sentence of WP:Shortcut may have confused a developer. It read "A shortcut is a specialized type of redirect page that provides an abbreviated wikilink to a project page or one of its sections, usually from the Wikipedia namespace." There is a debate about whether or not to delete all shortcuts in article space, but even the staunchest supporter admits the longstanding MOS: prefix. If this bug persists for political reasons, it is tyranny, for I believe the consensus is to leave the "articles" that start with the four characters MOS: and are shortcuts to subpages and sections in WP:Manual of Style, are to be left intact.