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Disambiguation pages should be on top
Open, Needs TriagePublicFeature

Description

Feature summary: The disambiguation page for a search term should be on the top of the result list and the suggested list

Use case(s): If I type a search term, the shortest string is usually the most general and will lead to an disambiguation page.
E.g. if I look for something or someone call "Goethe", the algorithm suggests "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe" on top, which makes sense. But "Goethe (disambiguation)" doesn't even make the top ten, so it is never shown on the mobile page, where there is no result page.
There might be the "Template:Redirect" as a workaround like in this case, but not in all cases. It's not reliable and not a good user experience.

Benefits: Especially casual and mobile users will have a better search experience with more successful search results

Event Timeline

Gehel subscribed.

This seems overfitting for a very specific use case, it is highly likely that we will make the experience worth for more people. I'm declining this ticket. If there is a higher level use case that makes sense we can try to dig into it.

Note that in this particular example, the autocomplete does not raise the disambiguation page to the top 10, but the full text search places it as the 3rd result.

This seems overfitting for a very specific use case, it is highly likely that we will make the experience worth for more people. I'm declining this ticket. If there is a higher level use case that makes sense we can try to dig into it.

Note that in this particular example, the autocomplete does not raise the disambiguation page to the top 10, but the full text search places it as the 3rd result.

There is no full text search in the mobile app.

Gehel added subscribers: JTannerWMF, Seddon.

@Seddon / @JTannerWMF : it seems to me that the solution here might be to have better integration with full text search in the mobile app. Is this something that make sense? Or should this ticket be declined?

Clipboard_04-13-2024_01.jpg (1×550 px, 80 KB)
l found a really good example today. Of course the most readers will know the primary topic "Tent". But if you are looking for something you don't know, e.g. people with the name "Tent", you are obliged to klick on the first link, which shows through its thumbnail it is obviously not about people.
There you have to find the disambiguation link, which, lucky for you, is the first link on the page. Not a given in the English Wikipedia.
The disambiguation page doesn't show up in the search at all.

At first I wanted to speak out against making this a thing, but I think for the cases where the search request matches the standard page name of the disambiguation page (should be configurable), it makes a lot of sense to show it as a second result. So if you enter Tent and Tent (disambiguation) is a thing, it should be displayed more prominently even if it has low page views.

Currently the search system disadvantages disambiguation pages significantly since they don’t get visited as much as the articles (and never could be). For the disambiguation pages located at the ‘main’ title (Smith, not Smith (disambiguation)) this doesn’t present a problem at all since they get shown first, but many disambiguation pages can use the qualifier in the page name due to the more known main term but still be very useful to readers.