Wikipedia talk:Look for an existing article before you start one

Supporters of this rule include: Larry Sanger, tbc, Josh Grosse, AxelBoldt, Koyaanis Qatsi, JHK (This is SOOOO important), 24 (strongly), Rotem Dan, Kaihsu, Patrick, Kingturtle*

Opponents include: Damian Yerrick (Doing this is highly non-trivial until Wikipedia begins to allow searching for phrases and for words shorter than four letters. Once this happens, move me to supporters.)

Somewhere in between: goatasaur Justfred Sure, this makes sense - but while you're at it, if the page wasn't where you expected to be, either make a new redirect, or move it and redirect the original/any linked articles, so the next person won't have the same problem. User:Deb You can try, but you will often fail without a decent search engine. I know - I have.


 * Am I allowed to chime in here? Nothing ruins a wiki-day more than spending over an hour an a new article, and then finding out that someone already wrote one, and a damn good one. That time could have been spent spot checking and improving the existing article and spent writing an article on Arthur Murray and the lot. So, it is in one's interest to check before diving in. g'day. Kingturtle 00:53 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

Why is it not possible to search for phrases or words shorter than four letters? Is somebody working on fixing that? Can somebody put a link here about improving the Wikipedia search engine? Thanks a bunch! --Nelson


 * The current minimum is two letters, not four. (Anything that says four is very out of date and should be corrected.) Phrase searching should be supported now that we've upgraded to MySQL 4, but it won't be active until some changes are made to the search page code to use it. I'll try to get to that tomorrow. --Brion 07:23 18 May 2003 (UTC)

Searching doesn't always help. Tannin and I independently and simultaneously wrote Tinamou (surprised there weren't more on this popular topic) jimfbleak 07:21 18 May 2003 (UTC)
 * It should be a lot less problematic now that the article text search works again (Thanks Brion!). - Hephaestos 07:24 18 May 2003 (UTC)


 * I redirected to How to start a page, because this seems like sensible advice, and nobody's opposed it, so we can put it with the rest of the advice :) Martin