"Manual" is one of the main content namespaces on MediaWiki.org, but due to the current weighting system, if you search for anything in the Manual namespace, it often won't show up in the first page of results. For example, if you search for wgCategoryCollation, the page about this global variable (Manual:$wgCategoryCollation) is the 31st result.
There should be a way to adjust the namespace weightings per wiki and not penalize pages in the "Manual" namespace on MediaWiki.org.
| Subject | Repo | Branch | Lines +/- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [cirrus] Increase weigths for content namespaces on mw.org | operations/mediawiki-config | master | +7 -0 |
Created a replica of the mediawikiwiki index in labs to help test/tuning this wiki. I think I've setup all the wiki options properly but I can't reproduce the issue there : a search for wgCategoryCollation returns the page in the manual namespace as the first result. I must be missing some other config options, I'll continue to investigate...
Found the issue, there was a conflict with some weights set by Erik. Reset to production default and now I can reproduce. I'll start to tune the namespace weights now.
Increased weights for content namespaces from 0.2 to 0.9 and the results for wgCategoryCollation look much better now.
@kaldari could you have a quick look here? It'd be great if you have in mind a query where a low weight for such namespaces was interesting.
Side note: I'd be tempted to raise this default weight for other wikis as well, but not really sure on how to test this.
Change 332513 had a related patch set uploaded (by DCausse):
[cirrus] Increase weigths for content namespace weight on mw.org
Note that we have $wgContentNamespaces which for MediaWiki.org sets: 0, 100, 102, 104, 106 (though not 12 which is Help).
Change 332513 merged by jenkins-bot:
[cirrus] Increase weigths for content namespaces on mw.org
Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2017-01-24T14:13:40Z] <dcausse@tin> Synchronized wmf-config/InitialiseSettings.php: T155142 [cirrus] Increase weigths for content namespaces on mw.org (duration: 00m 39s)
I added 12 because it's part of the namespaces searched by default (set by $wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault).
Sadly I think we've lost the reasons why those boost were so low...
I'd love to fix this for other wikis but I'm afraid of breaking some important usecases.