Wikimedia:Searching

To search the Wikimedia Foundation website:

• There should be a small search box at the side of the screen, marked search, followed by Go and Search. Just type what you're looking for into the search box and press the Enter key. Or, click Go or Search.

The difference between Go (same as enter) and Search is that Go 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 which is a full-text search for the given words. Important search tips:

• Don't search for only words in quotes. Try the search without quotes first. If that's not good enough, put as many words as possible outside the quotes or add some more to narrow the search.

• While Go is usually, but not always, case insensitive, Search is always case insensitive.

• Search is a treated as a secondary function of the MediaWiki software and is sometimes unreliable and even completely disabled for performance reasons. If you can't find something you're expecting to find, please try an external search engine.

Part of this page has been copied to meta:Help:Searching and adapted for MediaWiki in general. When you want to edit the text, compare the two pages to see where the edit can best be made.