From PsychWiki - A Collaborative Psychology Wiki
There are several ways to find what you are looking for:
The full-text search bar (located in the top-right) can be used like any other search engine, with some exceptions described below.
- The Go button first looks for an article with the given string as its title, and if one is found immediately goes to the indicated article. If Go fails to find an article, it then automatically executes "Search".
- The Search button is a full-text search that returns Article title matches and Page Text matches. You can refine or expand the search by clicking on the namespaces listed at the bottom of the search page.
- Searching Exceptions and Limitaitons:
- Avoid short and common words
- This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all pages, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search. See Common words for which searching is not possible for the stop words filtered out by the database. From there one can at least go to a page with a stop word as title. Searching for the combination of one or more words and the common word "not" give a database query syntax error due to a bug in the software.
- Search is case-insensitive
- The searches for "fortran", "Fortran" and "FORTRAN" all return the same results.
- There is no method for searching for a phrase. Contrary to what you might expect, enclosing phrases in double quotation marks such as "can of tuna" will retrieve all pages containing "of" "tuna" and "can".
- No regular expressions or wildcards
- You cannot use regular expressions or wildcards such as ? or *. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it. To search for pages with the words "boat" or "boats" search like this: "boat or boats".
- Words in single quotes
- If a word appears in a page with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable it is better to use double quotes in pages, for which this problem does not arise. An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe s is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.
- Delay in updating the search index
- For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes to pages are not always immediately taken into account in searches.
Using Google within PsychWiki
- The following link opens a Google search for only pages within PsychWiki. Open the link and type in what you are looking for:
- Every page has a link labelled "What links here".
- This is a form of backlinking -- the pages linking to and/or embedding the given page are listed.
- The "What links here" facility has the following properties and limitations:
- a list of articles which links to the specified page are displayed chronologically, from old at the top to most recently linked at the bottom.
- not listed are subpages that just have an automatic link to a page.
- the backlinks feature shows which backlinks are redirects. This makes it a useful tool for finding double redirects, which do not work, and, except in special applications can better be replaced by redirects to the final target.
- The list of links to an article is useful in a number of ways:
- It gives a very rough indication of how popular a page is. Pages with many links are likely to be viewed often and should therefore be of the very best quality. Pages with few or no links may not be very popular.
- Where the subject material of an article is unclear, the list of articles linking to it might provide useful context. For instance when presented with a stub about John Smith that gives only his date of birth and death, viewing the list of links to the article might reveal that he won a gold medal in the Olympics.
Other Ways to find what you are looking for
- 1. Surfing the Mainpage
- 2. Using the Special pages section found here which allows you to search for:
- All Topics - lists all pages within PsychWiki in alphabetical order. Initially, the "All Topics" page lists those Articles within the "Main" namespace, but you can also refine or expand your search by viewing Article or Discussion pages within other namespaces, such as "help", "templates", "images", "MediaWiki", "Categories", and "Users" (i.e., "namespaces" are simply classification labels to help organize the pages). The "All Topics" page only lists pages that have been edited (so not pages with red links that have no content yet).
- Random page - redirects to a random page from the main namespace which is not a redirect. Other namespaces can be specified as a parameter. Fun to use to look around PsychWiki.
- Most linked pages - pages with the most links in descending order.
- Popular pages - shows the most visited pages.
- Wanted pages - show Articles which have been requested / most wanted, but do not yet have content. Any interwiki linking with "red" links means the page has been created but not edited yet, so "Wanted Pages" shows the pages in descending order that are most wanted.
- Categories - shows which "Categories" exist within PsychWiki. Categories are automatic indexes that are useful as a table of contents. PsychWiki uses Categories for the research, people, concepts, null findings, and Virtual Lab Meeting.
- Uncategorized pages - shows pages without category tags (note that after adding a tag to a page refreshing this page does not immediately reflects the change).
- Uncategorized categories - shows categories that do not have a "meta-category".
- Unused categories - shows categories that have been created but no pages have been added to that category yet.
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