If you want to do something wacky like change the width of the columns, use the template ((PrefixIndex)), which is a simple wrapper for this plus another parameter for column widths. Go try it out!
Is it possible to pass parameters in a wikilink to the PrefixIndex page as can be done in the transclusion syntax?
I.e like:
((Special:PrefixIndex/((FULLPAGENAME))/ |hideredirects=1 |stripprefix=1))
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)[reply]
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--IAmChaos23:47, 18 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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: phab: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.
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 __DISAMBIG__. — Qwerfjkltalk19:07, 2 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]