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Searching for an IP address in the MediaWiki search bar takes you to that IP's contributions
Open, LowPublicBUG REPORT

Description

Steps to reproduce:

  1. go to https://en.wikipedia.org/
  2. enter 1.2.3.4 in the search bar and press enter

Expected behavior: you see a search results page

Actual behavior: you are forwarded to Special:Contributions/1.2.3.4.

I don't think this behavior makes any sense.

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

Interesting: also not my expected behavior. But it looks like according to the help page, this is actually expected behavior (not a bug): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:User_contributions#Accessing

Also, if you select the option to "Search for pages containing 1.2.3.4", you'll get the expected search results page. It seems like at some point, somebody added a feature to quickly search for contributions based on IP

Screen Shot 2022-04-18 at 13.45.48.png (1×1 px, 187 KB)

Apparently it was added in 2004: rMW7c98afbdb7ae: Handy shortcut: paste in an IP address and click go, redirects to the user… Makes sense on a small wiki, I suppose. It's configurable via $wgEnableSearchContributorsByIP - maybe time to disable it for Wikimedia wikis? It's probably more common that a reader would want to search for an IP-like string than an editor relying on this feature to check an IP's contributions, when we have navpopups etc. these days. (cc @tstarling)

Gehel triaged this task as Low priority.Apr 20 2022, 7:40 PM
Gehel moved this task from needs triage to Feature Requests on the Discovery-Search board.