I recently noticed that the search bar on the wiki brings up redirect pages for some tags. For example, the “Driveway” redirect page pointing to Tag:service=driveway. However, some pages do not have such a redirect page. If you type in “access aisle”, the only search suggestion is for the proposal. Are redirect pages the only way for longer tags to show up as search suggestions? Should users be expected to type in Tag:footway=a before the access aisle tag is suggested, or is there some type of page alias feature? I don’t have the ability to create these redirect pages, otherwise I would be glad to fill in the gap here.
If you press Enter or click on “Search for pages containing access aisle”, you’ll go to the full search results, which start out with the page for footway=access_aisle. There’s also a red link to “access aisle”. If you click on that, you can create the redirect to the correct page.
I think the reason “access aisle” doesn’t turn up an inline suggestion for the correct page is that the proposal matches the beginning of that page’s name (when ignoring the Proposal: namespace prefix). Pages such as “Tag:footway=access_aisle” are actually in the main namespace; “Tag:” is just a hard-coded prefix in the page name, not a real namespace. The proposal page must rank so high that it doesn’t bother to list anything that has the search term later in the title. The same issue affects searching for “priority”, for example.
I’m unsure if there’s a way to configure the find-as-you-type feature. Maybe someone more familiar with CirrusSearch, specifically the completion suggester, could make sense of this debug output detailing how “Tag:footway=access_aisle” and “Proposal:Access aisle” are being indexed.
That would be nice, but unfortunately we already have a bit of a mess of namespaces. A handful of languages have their own namespaces for historical reasons (such as DE: for German), while the rest are topical (such as Proposal:). If we spin out a new Tag: namespace, would “DE:Tag:footway=access_aisle” remain at that title or become “Tag:De:footway=access_aisle”? Meanwhile, the majority of languages that don’t have their own namespace, so “Pt:Tag:footway=access_aisle” would become “Tag:Pt:footway=access_aisle”. We probably would still have the same search suggestion problem for a different set of queries.
Probably a simpler solution would be to just create appropriate redirects. I’ve been doing that sporadically, when I noticed that the search results are misleading. Doing that manually has an additional advantage that you can create a curated disambiguation page when you see a need, e.g. Towing.
I’m not sure if anyone on OSM Wiki has used AutoWikiBrowser for similar tasks (I used it back in my Wikipedia days). It requires some elevated permissions on your account, and I didn’t bother asking our admins so that I could toy with it.
Agreed that it doesn’t hurt to create redirects, particularly when searching for a tag doesn’t bring up the relevant page until the 7th or 10th result. e.g.
