Help:Searching
From PLN
The quickest way to find information in the PALINET Leadership Network is to look it up directly. On the left-hand side of your screen there is a Search box with two buttons under it labeled "Go" and "Search".
Put your keywords in the searchbox.
- Go (or pressing Enter) will take you directly to the article if it exists.
- Search will search the text of all pages in PLN (with some restrictions, see below).
If you click Search or click Go and the page you're looking for does not exist, you will be presented with a list of articles that match your search criteria (or a message that no matches were found).
How it works
Here's how searches work:
- Only the article content is searched - the page title is ignored.
- The article content is searched in raw (wikitext) form - i.e., the text that appears in the edit box when you click edit, not the page you normally see. This means content coming from an included template will not be searched.
- Even if you enclose a phrase in quotes, the search looks for each word individually. If you enter "world war 2" it will return pages that contain "world" and "war" and "2".
- The search is not case-sensitive. "Planning", "planning" and "PLANNING" all give the same result.
Restricting the search
If you click the Search button without filling in anything, you will be taken to 'Special:Search' which gives you extra searching options (also available from any search results list)
You may find it useful to restrict a search to pages within a particular namespace e.g. only search within the 'Talk' pages. Check off the namespaces you require for this search.
By default only the namespaces specified in your preferences will be searched. Logged-in users can change their preferences to specify the namespaces they want to search by default.
