Help:Searching

This page is a SmashWiki help page, intended to be a guide to helping users understand SmashWiki and its functionalities. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. If in doubt, consider discussing changes on the talk page.

To search this wiki, go to Special:Search, or enter a term in the search box you see in the sidebar.

SmashWiki's search box is located at the left on every page. It will take you to the article with the title you entered, if it exists; otherwise it displays the search results. In addition to article titles, the source text (what one sees in the edit box, also called wiki text) is searched.

If you want to force the display of search results, go to Special:Search.

Search results page

The default search only applies to the Mainspace, where articles are stored. Other types of content pages can be searched by selecting "Advanced".

If Multimedia is selected, you can search images, videos and songs stored on SmashWiki. This option will search their file names and descriptions.

If Help and Project pages is selected, you can search the "Help" and "SmashWiki" namespaces. These namespaces contain help pages, SmashWiki guidelines and policies, and all pages used for administration and maintenance of the site.

If Everything is selected, you can search all namespaces.

To search in any subset of namespaces, click Advanced on the search form.

Registered users can modify the default namespace to search in "My Preferences". They can also choose how much context and how many hits per page to display when viewing search results.

Navigation pages

Navigation pages will attempt to guide you to the correct article. You may encounter two types of these pages when searching for a topic.

Disambiguation

You may type in something like Mushroom Kingdom, that takes you to a list of the many things that you could mean by it. This type of page is called a disambiguation page, and it's there to make things easier for you. Such a page prevents you from having to guess the exact phrase used to identify each page.

Redirection

Some things can be referred to by many names. Robotic Operating Buddy, for instance, could also be called R.O.B.. Searching is set up so that if you search for any of those terms, you will be redirected to the proper place. If instead of being redirected you are taken to a search menu, then you have searched for a phrase that has not been set up to redirect to an article. In such a case, you may look through the search results for an appropriate topic, try searching for an alternative spelling or name for the term. Once you have found what you were looking for, consider adding a new redirect for the expressions that you tried that did not lead to an article because chances are that you are not the only one thinking about the topic in this way. Thus, in doing so you will make life easier for those who later search for the term.

Using the search to directly get to a page

When using the search to directly get to a page, it doesn't matter whether you enter capitals or lower case letters (unless there are two article titles which differ only in capitalization).

Specialized uses of the search to directly get to a page include the following:

• To navigate to a section of a page using anchor notation. For example, "Music (SSBB)#The Legend of Zelda".
• To navigate to a special page, including one with a parameter following a slash. For example, "Special:Log/upload".

If you cannot find what you are looking for

If there is no appropriate page on SmashWiki, consider creating a page, so long as the content follows other SmashWiki policies (such as the notability policy).