https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61669
Bug ID: 61669
Summary: search result excerpt should prefer first sentence of
article
Product: MediaWiki extensions
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: All
Status: NEW
Severity: normal
Priority: Unprioritized
Component: CirrusSearch
Assignee: wikibugs-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Reporter: suma...@wikimedia.org
CC: dga...@wikimedia.org, innocentkil...@gmail.com,
neverett+bugzi...@wikimedia.org
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
I'm on English Wikipedia and I've turned on "new search" in the beta features.
I used the search box to search for "mackinnon":
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=mackinnon&title=Special%3ASearch&fulltext=1
The excerpt that shows up on the search results page now, with CirrusSearch,
comes from citations 5 and 6 in the article on Catharine MacKinnon:
"Highly Cited Author - Catharine A. MacKinnon ^ Catharine MacKinnon 2005 Fellow
of Stanford's Center for"
This feels like a less optimal result. I think we should prefer the first
sentence in an article, maybe especially for articles that are biographies. For
instance, the body of the article on Catharine MacKinnon starts:
"Catharine Alice MacKinnon (born October 7, 1946) is an American feminist,
scholar, lawyer, teacher and activist."
Under the old search, that's what shows up on the search results page, albeit
with some extraneous spaces around the commas. This is more relevant to a user
who is trying to find a particular person's biography. In general, I suspect
that the first sentence of a wiki page is more likely to help a searcher gauge
relevance than is an excerpt from footnotes.
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