Help:Searching
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Searching is the quickest way to find information in a ShoutWiki wiki. While the location of the search bar varies between skins, it's usually located either in the left-hand sidebar or on the top right of every page.
To search, enter your search term(s) and press one of the two buttons:
- Go
- clicking this (or pressing Enter) will take you to the page, if it exists
- Search
- clicking this searches articles on the wiki
How it works
- It searches all pages on the wiki with some restrictions.
- The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click “edit”, not the rendered page. This means that content coming from an included template will not be picked up, but the target of piped links will be.
- Even if you enclose a phrase in quotes, the search looks for each word individually. e.g., if you enter "world war 2" it will return pages that contain "world" and "war" and "2".
- The search is not case-sensitive, so "MediaWiki", "mediawiki" and "MEDIAWIKI" all give the same result.
Restricting the search
If you click the “Search” button without filling in anything, you will be taken to Special:Search, which gives you extra searching options (also available from any search results list).
You may find it useful to restrict a search to pages within a particular namespace e.g., only search within the User pages. Check the namespaces you require for this search.
By default only the namespaces specified in your search preferences will be searched. Logged-in users can change their preferences to specify the namespaces they want to search by default. This can be done via the "Advanced" tab on the search page, Special:Search, by selecting and deselecting the desired boxes and checking the "Remember selection for future searches" checkbox.