Considering Wikipedia's vastness, finding exactly what you're looking for can be a challenge. Fortunately, search is a powerful technology. This chapter will explain how to search Wikipedia effectively.
But searching for a specific piece of information is not the only way to use Wikipedia. Unlike the sections in a printed book, Wikipedia articles are not in any particular order; instead, they can be bundled together by topic and in many other ways. This grouping makes it great fun to browse Wikipedia casually and facilitates chance discovery: Filling out your understanding of a topic's background is usually painless, and one topic can lead to another in a surprising and enjoyable way.
Whether you're reading Wikipedia for fun or serious study, mastering some key research and navigation skills will help you make the most of your time. Therefore, this chapter will also describe the key structures set up for browsing (portals, categories, and lists) and will explain some basic navigational tools, including the links on the website's left-hand sidebar.
As usual, this chapter will show you where to look up detailed and up-to-date explanations of the topics that are covered here only in brief.
If you're looking for a particular topic, name, or phrase, searching the site directly is the way to start. Wikipedia's search function is like consulting the index volume of an encyclopedia, minus the tedium. In the best cases, you are only a few seconds away from answering a query.
When you search Wikipedia, you're harnessing a powerful combination of technologies—the organic growth of the encyclopedia itself and the ability to sift instantly through hundreds of millions of words.
The Wikipedia search engine searches not only the titles of all two million articles but also their full text. The search engine also includes alternate article titles (redirect titles). (In addition, you can search Wikipedia pages that are not articles, as we'll explain.) The search engine works on the current database, so it will find even the newest articles.
If a search doesn't turn up anything, Wikipedia may not have let you down. Sometimes finding what you're looking for can take persistence. You can make your searches more focused, broad, or powerful. Learning about the structure of the site and the conventions governing how articles are named will also make your searches more worthwhile.
Finally, search doesn't cover all situations. For example, you may suspect that you are using the wrong spelling. You could be looking for a medical term that you would recognize in context but can't remember. Or you might want to know what topics are related to a particular academic field. In those cases, start by browsing categories and portals, as described in "Browsing by Topic" on Browsing by Topic.
Searching is simple: First find the search box located in the middle of the left-hand sidebar (see Figure 3-1) or go to [[Special:Search]]. Type your keyword(s) in the search box and then click one of the two buttons: Go or Search.
Clicking Go (or just pressing ENTER) takes you straight to the article with a title that is exactly the same as the words you entered.
If no article with that title exists, a list of articles that contain the search words in their title or text appears. Here you can opt to search again, with either the Wikipedia search engine or an outside search engine. (You'll also see a redlink to create a new article with the exact title you searched for; we'll talk about this in Chapter 6.)
If you click Search instead of Go, a list of articles that contain your search words in their title or text appears. The articles are listed in the following order:
Articles whose titles contain your search words
Articles whose full texts contain your search words somewhere
Redirects and disambiguation pages might also be listed; these pages can point you to an appropriate article.
The Go button is useful whenever you can guess the title of the article you're looking for. The Search button is a better bet if you're not sure about the exact title or if you're searching for less common terms.
Sometimes Go searches don't end up where you expect—especially when redirects are involved! Plural search terms can be especially problematic, as article titles usually use the singular form. For example, there is no article titled Beatle—if you enter the word Beatle, you are taken instead to [[The Beatles]]. But searching for Rolling Stone doesn't take you to [[The Rolling Stones]]; it takes you to [[Rolling Stone]], an article about the magazine. [[Trogg]] has nothing to do with [[The Troggs]] but instead redirects to [[List of characters in Sonic the Comic]]. Who knew? If you've been redirected, a notice will appear under the article's title in parentheses. If you don't get what you expect, a full-text search might help you find the article you're looking for. (And sometimes an article will helpfully point you toward unrelated articles with similar names.)
If you can't find an article about a topic but you feel sure it must exist in Wikipedia, try a full-text search using different keywords. For instance, the article titled [[Flag of the United States]] could also be titled [[American Flag]], [[The US Flag]], or any of a dozen similar things. You will often be redirected to the proper article—but not always. Redirects will take you to similar articles only in the most popular and developed areas of Wikipedia, so searching for synonyms is also important.
Searching for articles about people can be particularly tricky. The titles of biographical articles are supposed to be standardized (first name, last name, according to [[Wikipedia:Naming Conventions]], shortcut WP:NAME), but often vary in practice, especially if the name contains a combination of initials. If you're trying to track down John Karl Doe, a nonfiction writer, start by searching for John Doe, but also search for Doe, John as well as J.K. Doe, J. Doe, and Doe, J. Contributors also bring their own referencing styles to the site, which may invert or shorten names, or mistakes can creep in (like Carl for Karl). In the end, you might only find the article [[John C. Doe]] with persistence, perhaps as a redirect from Doe, JK. For less common names, searching for the last name only may get you what you're looking for and save much time in the end. This technique is particularly true for transliterated names or names with several historical spellings.
Using a full-text search, you can search for a complete phrase by placing it in quotes:
"in the nick of time"
Placing a phrase in quotes only returns results that contain exactly what you typed: all of the words in the order you entered them. On the other hand, if you don't use quotation marks, the search will find every article that contains—somewhere in it—each one of those words.
You can add additional words after the phrase search; for instance,
"Benjamin Franklin" lightbulb
returns all articles that contain both the phrase Benjamin Franklin and the word lightbulb.
To exclude a word from the search result, put a minus sign in front of it; for instance,
benjamin -franklin
returns all the articles that contain Benjamin but not Franklin.
When searching for lengthy phrases, phrases with wildcards, and phrases with Boolean operators (that is, combining terms or phrases with and, or, or not), use an external search engine, as described in "External Search Engines" on External Search Engines.
By default, the search function only searches articles—which means it only searches pages in the main namespace. But you can also search other namespaces (that is, non-article Wikipedia content). Here's how:
Perform a full-text search for your terms. A results page appears.
At the very bottom of the results page, a list of checkboxes allows you to specify which namespaces to search (for example, you can search user pages or talk pages or both). You can search any combination of namespaces. Check the types of pages you want to search, and then click the Search button.
If you commonly search non-article namespaces, you can automatically include them in your searches by changing your default search options under the Search tab in your User Preferences, in the upper right-hand corner if you are logged in.
Wikipedia's full-text search has a number of limitations, including the following:
If these problems seem daunting, remember that with a little cleverness, you can use search engines like Google to replace Wikipedia's built-in search engine (see the next section). Outside search engines don't suffer from the problems plaguing the built-in search engine. Whenever your search comes up empty, try searching using an external engine.
Wikipedia pages can also be found using ordinary search engines such as Google.
Most search engines allow you to restrict your search results to pages from a particular site. If you restrict your results to pages from Wikipedia, the outside search engine can replace Wikipedia's built-in search engine.
To search Wikipedia using Google, type
site:en.wikipedia.org "high and low"
into Google's search box.
This search has two components. The first half, site:en.wikipedia.org, tells Google to only search pages that begin with en.wikipedia.org, which means every page in the English-language Wikipedia. (Use site:wikipedia.org to search Wikipedias in every language.) The second half—"high and low"—is an ordinary Google phrase search.
Now click the Search button. The results page shows every Wikipedia article that contains the phrase high and low, including the Japanese film of that name and the feudal concept of high, middle, and low justice.
You don't have to use Google; you can use any search engine capable of restricting its results to pages from Wikipedia. For example, the search phrase above works equally well in Yahoo! and Google.
Wikipedia also has a drop-down menu next to the search field that allows you to choose, in addition to MediaWiki Search, an external search engine to use. As of mid-2008, the available search enginges include Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Wikiwix, and Exalead. For more information about searching, see [[Wikipedia:Searching]] (shortcut WP:SEARCH), which mentions many other possibilities. For example, other search engines designed for searching Wikipedia include LuMriX, WikiWax (not to be confused with Wikiwix), Qwika, and Wikiseek. LuMriX and WikiWax suggest article titles as you type, in the way an index might. Qwika is a search engine that searches Wikipedia across languages by using machine translation. Wikiseek searches across Wikipedia articles and groups its results into broad categories.
[[Wikipedia:Searching]] also describes plug-ins that let you search Wikipedia using your web browser's interface.
There are several cases when using external search engines instead of the onsite search is a good idea:
The onsite search is occasionally disabled when Wikipedia's servers are particularly strained. If you try to use the search engine while it's disabled, you'll be shown a list of links to external search engines.
You might prefer using a familiar search interface instead.
External engines often offer a short preview of each article on the results page.
You may need to perform a complex search that is difficult or impossible to achieve using Wikipedia's built-in engine.
By default, external engines search across all Wikipedia namespaces, making it easier to find relevant policy, category, or image pages.
Search engines aren't magic. In order to find out what websites say, they send out computer programs called spiders that scurry out across the Internet, parse the contents of a web page just as a person might (though, of course, a million times faster), and carry the information back to the search engines.
This means that if a web page has been created recently, Google might not be able to find it. New Wikipedia articles sometimes take days or weeks to appear in external search engines, but Wikipedia's built-in engine can find them minutes after they're created.
Similarly, if a web page has changed recently, Google might "remember" the out-of-date version of the page, not the current version. For example, if the death of Catherine the Great has only just been added to the Wikipedia article [[Toilet-related injury]], a Google search for might not find that page. Conversely, if the word breakfast has just been removed from the [[Youtiao]] article, a Google search for will return the Youtiao article if Google has not parsed the article since breakfast was removed. But once you click Google's link to the article, the word breakfast is nowhere to be found. In this event, you might investigate the article's history to discover the circumstances in which your search term was removed.
site:en.wikipedia.org "catherine the great" toilet
site:en.wikipedia.org salted fried chinese breakfast dough