Context: The AC/DC gadget has browser tests which test that the gadget is not broken by any recent changes to WikibaseMediaInfo (given that the gadget uses WBMI internals that are not guaranteed to be stable). In CI, those browser tests run against a local MediaWiki with a fairly minimal setup (just Wikibase, WikibaseMediaInfo, and their hard dependencies UniversalLanguageSelector and WikibaseCirrusSearch – but without actually using CirrusSearch/Elasticsearch).

A few days ago (first broken test run: 28 May 2026, 1:20 AM CEST; previously successful on 27 May 2026, 0:31 AM CEST), these tests broke with a new kind of error:

1​) statements can add a single statement to two files
expected selected property entry for statement to add
Error: expected selected property entry for statement to add

at async ACDC.addPropertyToAdd (/home/runner/work/ACDC/ACDC/test/browser/pageobjects/ACDC.js:86:3)
at async Context.<anonymous> (/home/runner/work/ACDC/ACDC/test/browser/specs/acdc.js:466:4)

This test is trying to search for a property (in the WBMI property selector) using its property ID (not a label), but can’t find a lookup entry to click on; while I haven’t been able to run the test locally (and also haven’t set up CI to take screenshots yet), I suspect search is not returning any entries to display.

Based on a hunch, I tracked this down to being caused by the Wikibase change Search: Enable PropertyWbSearchEntitiesController (T425645). CI confirms that the build works when checking out the immediate parent of that commit, and fails when checking out that commit itself.

CC @Silvan_WMDE – I know we talked about something related to the search refactoring at Wikimedia-Hackathon-2026; I don’t remember what the outcome of that was, but surely it’s not expected that Wikibase without WikibaseCirrusSearch doesn’t have functioning search at all, even when using the entity ID as input?