Bug (*not* Feature) on Wiki in Search for "Screen"

[August]

I have been wrestling with learning about screen coordinates for window positioning. Up to now, I have been using hardcoded values for size and position, but I recognize the wisdom in calculating positions (and sizes) based on the current screen parameters.

However, when I searched for "screen" in the Wiki, the search results omitted the single most important page for understanding things like Screen vs. ScreenVisible.

Here are my search results:

And here is the page that I eventually found, after finding a link to it in the Forum:

If I had seen that particular title in the Results list of my search, erroneously titled "Matching pagenames", I would have had my answer in a jiffy. Instead I had to "take the long way 'round the barn" to get there.

I pedantically maintain that this is an error, the results are titled "Matching pagenames" yet the most important existing page name is not listed. Yes, there are three links in the results that redirect to the page I need, but those nonexistant pages are listed while yet the existing page is not listed. That creates confusion that took me an annoying amount of time to resolve.

If I had my Editor hat on, I would flag that and send it back to the author and its presence would not annoy me, it would be my job to find such things. But I have my Newbie Developer hat on, and find this to be annoyingly less helpful than it could easily be.

Is there something in the Wiki software that prevents a page from being listed if there are redirects to it? I doubt that. Is the page flagged as "hidden, requires redirect to find"? I doubt it, although there are pages without titles that seem to fall into that category. Is the results page pre-populated and out of date? That seems an odd way to implement a search function. Therefor I maintain that it is a BUG! How the bug occurs, I cannot fathom, but there it is.

[peternlewis]

@August

I pedantically maintain that this is an error, the results are titled "Matching pagenames" yet the most important existing page name is not listed.

The pagenames it talks about are the names of the page, in this case the name of the page is “SCREEN” and the namespace is “function”.

“SCREEN, SCREENVISIBLE and SCREENINDEX Functions”

is not the name of the page, it is the title of the page, which is the destination of several pagenames. I think this is where some of the confusion lies.

@August

Yes, there are three links in the results that redirect to the page I need, but those nonexistant pages are listed while yet the existing page is not listed.

No there aren't, there are two pagenames that redirect to the SCREEN pagename.

@August

Is there something in the Wiki software that prevents a page from being listed if there are redirects to it?

@August

Is the page flagged as "hidden, requires redirect to find"? I doubt it, although there are pages without titles that seem to fall into that category.

@August

Is the results page pre-populated and out of date?

Nope to all of those.

@August

Therefor I maintain that it is a BUG! How the bug occurs, I cannot fathom, but there it is.

I don't see any bug.

I think in this case the problem is trying to search for “screen” when that is an exceptionally generic search term. If you search instead of “screenvisible” you get:

With the first full text result being the page you refer o and the title shown (albeit with markup).

Personally, I wish I had a better wiki than DokuWiki (and I tried my best to get the Discourse folks create a wiki), but it is what it is, and I haven't seen a lot of better alternatives. It's quite out of date, and I might try to update it at some point, but I doubt that will improve things dramatically (I just had a quick look at the dokuwiki home wiki and the search looks virtually unchanged).

[August]

@peternlewis

is not the name of the page, it is the title of the page, which is the destination of several pagenames. I think this is where some of the confusion lies.

I agree, this is confusing, especially to newbies who are among the most important parts of the audience. Material meant for newcomers should never depend on grasping terminology differences that are anything other than inutive. That's as bad as a beginning physics text using greek letters for variables and adding subscripts to the variables, following unnamed conventions that were established in the 19th century. (Unfortunately, I've seen it.)

I appreciate that there's little you can do about how Docuwiki names things. Perhaps better handholding could be added to the prose descriptions.