Template talk:Searchmenu

Edit request to standardize the search result blurb

Please replace each of these pages with the template logic here. I did implement some wording changes, but to make the message displayed more robust (including properly formatting template links, adding a link to create a page/upload a file, etc.).

For each of these:

• MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new: Replace with {{searchmenu|1=$1|2=$2|cancreate=1}} → The article $1 does not exist. You may create this page, create a draft and submit it for review, or request that a redirect be created.
• MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new-nocreate: Replace with {{searchmenu|1=$1|2=$2}} → The article $1 does not exist. You may create a draft and submit it for review, or request that a redirect be created.
• MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new-external: Replace with {{searchmenu|1=$1|2=$2|exists=interwiki}} → The article $1 may exist on another website. You may follow this link to go there.
• MediaWiki:Searchmenu-exists: Replace with {{searchmenu|1=$1|2=$2|exists=exists}} → The article $1 exists. You may follow this link to go there.

After doing this please fully protect this template. Aasim (話す（はなす）) 20:01, 4 June 2026 (UTC)

I was going to implement this since the request has been here so long uncontested, but since it would probably have more wide reaching effects I want to make sure it's done right -pinging @Tamzin and @Xaosflux who are more familiar with these templates. -- Reconrabbit (talk) 15:56, 6 July 2026 (UTC)

I think standardizing these messages to wrap a single template would make sense. However, I'm not sure that this template fully emulates the existing behavior at these messages. My involvement in these messages is in adding the feature that links to both "foo" and foo if you search foo; as far as I can tell, that has been removed in this consolidation? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 12:32, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

I did not understand the purpose of that feature, it felt pointless to me, but if you want to add that logic back into the templated message (and there's consensus to do it) please feel free to go ahead. Aasim (話す（はなす）) 15:31, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

I think you have the consensus logic backwards here. The current state of each message that you want to replace represents the editorial consensus regarding what those messages should look like. If you want to replace the messages with a template that replicates their functionality but streamlines the logic, that's usually a noncontroversial change that doesn't need consensus. But if you want to remove functionality, that does require consensus. In this case, the functionality you've removed is there to reduce the rate at which people mistakenly create articles at titles like "foo" because they clicked the redlink in the search results. Looking closer at your proposed changes above, you've made a number of other changes that would require consensus too. For instance, MediaWiki talk:Searchmenu-new has had lots of discussion over the years about how to word "You may create this page..."; we can't supersede that all in a single edit request that none of that message's watchers know about.

I am going to mark this as Not done for now. If you'd like to reformulate this to be a purely technical change, i.e. just unifying logic behind a single template without changing how the messages display, I'm fine with actioning this. Or if you'd like to open a discussion about overhauling the wording and logic behind all four messages, with whatever changes you'd like to make, you can open a centralized discussion here and notify users at the four messages' talkpages of the discussion, and if there's consensus we can make those changes. But in its current state I cannot action this. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 17:59, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Okay, will do. Aasim (話す（はなす）) 18:09, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Okay, I added the quotation helper which directs the user to a different set of search results (including the single quotation mark), but it is not working correctly right now. Perhaps you can help adjust the logic so it works properly to detect the quotation marks and stops them? Aasim (話す（はなす）) 03:54, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

I'm not really sure how to fix that, because I don't understand what you're doing in this diff. You've added the logic in a different place, linking to a different thing (the search results for the unquoted version, for some reason?), with different wording (which adds a grammatical error, namely a comma splice). Like I said, this can't be actioned as a non-controversial technical change if it changes the behavior of the messages, and you're continuing to change them even further. Again, if you want to change the wording and behavior of these messages, you will need to get consensus somewhere. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 08:26, 18 July 2026 (UTC)