Wikipedia talk:Special:PrefixIndex


 * For advanced pagenames searches use the grep tool

Google search trick to help with suffixes
In Google search, try the following (quote marks included): where you replace "%s" with the suffix you're interested in. It's imperfect but useful. — ¾-10 20:11, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
 * "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*%s"
 * "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ * %s"

This will find references to those pages on other sites as well, you'd be better off with: Bigmantonyd (talk) 01:44, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
 * site:en.wikipedia.org inurl:"wiki/*%s"
 * site:en.wikipedia.org inurl:%s (assuming your string isn't present in "en.wikipedia.org/wiki")

I can dig it! Cheers! - SWIM [first time wiki editor as of like 10min ago lol] HowdyImSWIM (talk) 11:19, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

I'll proudly wear this badge Nguthi Joseph k (talk) 11:18, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Passing parameters in wikilink
Is it possible to pass parameters in a wikilink to the PrefixIndex page as can be done in the transclusion syntax?

I.e like:

If so, what's the proper syntax?

Search with trailing space
I wish to search all articles (and exclude redirects) that start with Dr without the dot after it. I understand that I cannot enclose the search term with quotes. If it was allowed, I only had to enter "Dr " with a space. But giving Dr followed by a space, is not working as the search seems to be removing the trailing space. Giving Dr. with a space after it also is returning results (such as Dr.I) that do not have space after Dr. .  Jay (Talk) 08:00, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
 * @Jay, You might want to try a regex search e.g.  &#8213;  Qwerfjkl  talk  08:01, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I forgot to inform that I had reposted this some months later at Help talk:Searching and got a response. Jay (talk) 08:54, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Substing this page?
Is there any way to subst the special page? 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him &#124; talk) 19:24, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Not the obvious way 1, 2. And the mw:Special:PrefixIndex links back to this enwiki page for documentation, I don't see any docs on the mediawiki site, nor does there exist an mw:Project:Special:PrefixIndex, like there is a en:Project:Special:PrefixIndex. I did figure you tried all that but I'm replying again just to see if anyone else with this on their watchlist has an ideas. Sorry Happy Editing-- IAm  Chaos  03:35, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm confused by what you mean - Article templates's documentation does it just fine, and your diff seems to be working as expected - what is what you expect to happen when you transclude substitute it, @EpicPupper @IAmChaos? casualdejekyll  22:59, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
 * When subst'ing? I would hope to just paste the contents that appeared in the transclusion. Yes transcluding works. Substing doesn't, look at my second diff above. Happy Editing-- IAm  Chaos  23:47, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Oh. Um. Hmm. What a pickle... casualdejekyll  23:49, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Did you ever find a solution for this? Fuzzyketchup (talk) 05:50, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
 * @Fuzzyketchup, I'm fairly sure this is impossible to subst. — Qwerfjkl  talk  09:14, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
 * @Fuzzyketchup I find that most use-cases for substitution can be approached in different, more efficent ways :) 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him &#124; talk) 20:32, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Hiding disambiguations
Is there any way to hide disambiguation pages when searching for articles beginning with certain characters? I know redirects can be hidden but can disambiguations be hidden? If not, would it be feasible to add such a feature? Dennis C. Abrams (talk) 14:05, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Not directly through this special page, but fortunately there is through Special:Search:
 * Special:Search/-"(disambiguation)" prefix:Foo gives page titles beginning with "Foo" that do not contain "(disambiguation)". (Technically this doesn't filter out WP:NOPRIMARYTOPIC disambigs, which don't have "(disambiguation)" in the title, but hopefully that will be enough.)
 * For more see Help:Searching. However, this, in turn, doesn't let you control redirects showing up in the results, because the MediaWiki software doesn't support that: T204089. If you really need to filter out both disambigs and redirs in an automated fashion, you'll have to code up something to fetch the search results and do that filtering locally, or ask someone for assistance with same.
 * If curious as to why: redirs are something handled specially inside the MediaWiki software, so it "knows" automatically whether or not a page is a redirect. Disambigs on the other hand, are just a page-titling convention Wikipedia's humans use to organize pages; the software doesn't "know" whether a page is a disambig.
 * Hope this helps, and if you have more questions ask away! Slowking Man (talk) 18:48, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Slowking Man, I'm not sure that's quite right. Links to disambiguation pages have a special class, and I believe disambiguation pages are marked with a magic word, something like . —  Qwerfjkl  talk  19:07, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Ah-ha! Turns out here on Wikipedia we have an extension that does that: mw:Extension:Disambiguator. Thanks for bringing that up. However it looks like unfortunately not "hooked in" to Special:Search at present, so filtering disambigs from there is still not possible. You have to go through the API and do some complex querying. Slowking Man (talk) 23:28, 2 January 2024 (UTC)