UESPWiki:Administrator Noticeboard/Archives/Search Log

Daveh has created a new Special page following this discussion on his talk page. It's only accessible by User Patrollers, Patrollers and Admins so anyone else will get a permission error I'm afraid. It's an early version at the moment, and currently lets us see just the 100 most recent searches along with the number of title matches, text matches, plus the time taken and the date/time of the search.

The idea was to see if any sensible searches were producing zero hits, so that we could create appropriate redirects. Of course, it turns out to be less straightforward. A quick glance at the log shows that the original approach to spelling used by many of our editors extends to searches. Of the current zero hit searches, we have "maradurs", "armor mithral", "merchent", "marader", "armorsmithing", "dust from getting glow o the the will wisp", "dust from getting glow o the the will wisp", "alyssia sir", "gaan mar", "gaan magic mar or rock", "kallist", "kallistor", "chamileon enchanted items", "tos v", "valtiere vicinte", "fathis ulles", "frostspire", "helmet kanch's", and "of savior tears teh". Now it's pretty clear what people were trying to find with many of those so the question is this: do we want to create redirects to help people who can't spell?

The previous attitude has been that we can't cater for every possible misspelling so we ought to stick to the correct name only. Except we also have a small number of Redirects from Misspellings, plus of course we have several redirects for British English spellings such as "Armour". I'm fairly split on this. On the one hand, we'll never be able to fix all the problems with dodgy spelling, and trying to do so will ultimately mean we have hundreds of misspelled redirects. On the other hand, our lovely pages aren't much help to people if they can't be found.

Okay, let's see what everybody thinks. rpeh  06:44, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

:My vote would go for only adding redirects for regional dialect misspellings, therefore Heavy Armor and Heavy Armour would have the same results, at least I assume that isn't the case right now, search isn't working for me it seems... But for every other case, we can't do much to help them. It is almost impossible to correct every potential misspelling, maybe a few cases for inappropriate spacing but besides that there isn't much we can do without creating hundreds of redirect for every possible item. --AKB   07:15, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

:Edit: Actually on further thought, that isn't a very good solution, especially for "Fantasy Words" that only complicate the issue, so therefore my vote now goes for allowing redirects for misspellings of "Fantasy Words" like the names of Dwemer Ruins which, by the way, the devs even misspell sometimes. For people who can't spell actual words like merchant though however, they will likely see their mistake and fix it, so we won't be serving a purpose by creating redirects for them. --AKB   07:20, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

::Even redirects for "fantasy words" would be tricky - some poor soul just searched for "akhuklan", "akuklan", "akkuklan", and "akkukhlan", all without luck. I assume he meant Akulakhan - and I must confess my first guess at the spelling was "Akhulakhan", which already has a redirect. Daveh is thinking about using a different search engine, which might make some of this moot, but I've already spotted some things that are worth creating as redirects. rpeh  15:02, 25 April 2011 (UTC)