Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2012 October 9

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Miscellaneous desk
< October 8 << Sep | October | Nov >> October 10 >
Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.



October 9[edit]

Article Created Does not appear in Wikipedia Search Bar[edit]

Hello, the problem I am currently experiencing is that I created a page, the American Osteopathic College of Radiology wikipedia page but the article is not searchable in the wikipedia search bar when just typing these words. The article itself works and if I type in the full name American Osteopathic College of Radiology and hit enter it takes me to that page but it does not show up in the search as it should. I have been told that the lag time for this change to occur is normally a few minutes and it has now been hours which is why I am concerned. I would appreciate advice on what's happening and if there is anything I can do to help resolve the problem or if this is some kind of error on wikipedia's side. As far as I can tell, it seems like I made the wikipedia page properly but I am still learning plenty about wikipedia and its policies. There was some note about an article similar to this one having been deleted in the past regarding an "unambiguous copyright infringment" in November of 2009 by user Kinu as seen in the public logs. Is this the reason why the article is not showing up? If so, how can this be resolved? I believe the article I established today does not have the same unambiguous copyright infringement problem and the article should be fine. Thanks in advance for the help! TylerDurden8823 (talk) 06:25, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I notice another article with a similar name: American Osteopathic College of Occupational & Preventive Medicine. It's possible there's a bug (or design limitation) with the search function not working in search strings where the first 32 letters are in common with another article. StuRat (talk) 06:43, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
So, what can I do about this problem? Anything? I know of the page you referred to (to clarify, that is indeed a different page than the one I'm discussing and has been around for a while) and I know the names are common but I'm still able to see articles with a common beginning. If there is such a bug, how do I know if it's there or how do I report it?TylerDurden8823 (talk) 06:57, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
There is a bug reporting process, and I'm sure others can hep you with that, but first I'd wait a few days, in case there's just more of a delay than usual. Also note that the more important search capability is Google's, as that's how many people find our articles. That isn't working yet, either, but give them both a few days. The Google search is much better, since it finds misspelled articles, while our search doesn't, unless somebody happened to have created a redirect for that misspelling. Heck, even capitalization can throw off our search. StuRat (talk) 07:08, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Can you tell me about this bug reporting process so I can report it if the issue isn't resolved in a few days? Thanks StuRat. TylerDurden8823 (talk) 07:10, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
See Wikipedia:Bug reports and feature requests. StuRat (talk) 07:14, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
There's two separate things here. One is that the internal search bar lags a bit - IIRC, it works from an index, and that index is periodically updated rather than instantly containing new pages. it takes some time for the index of articles it has to be regenerated to include newly created articles. The second is that the article was not yet patrolled, which I believe still prevents articles from showing up in search results. I've patrolled it now, so it should be visible. Andrew Gray (talk) 08:40, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It works fine for me. Typing in exactly "American Osteopathic College of Radiology" goes to exactly the right page. Searches are case sensitive, so maybe you didn't use uppercase "A", "O', "C" and "R". Astronaut (talk) 14:40, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Andrew, I see that it's working now although it still seems a bit buggy to me (you have to type all the way in to Coll to get it to come up but it should come up by the time you've written "American Osteopathic C" since the only things with this common root are the occupational/preventive medicine one and this article). Regardless, at least it shows up at all now. I still am not clear on what "patrolling" and the page curation log are but at least the page is accessible now. Astronaut, I was typing in the correct words, trust me on that, and it wasn't showing up before but it's resolved now. TylerDurden8823 (talk) 19:08, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note on article talk page[edit]

Hi, I left a note at Talk:DeLorean_DMC-12#Do_we_have_a_source_for_this.3F a while ago, but it seems nobody is watching the page, judging from the lack of replies. So, if you're reading this, please head over there, take a look, and see if you can contribute. Thank you. :-) -- 188.105.112.66 (talk) 14:30, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]