Topic on Talk:Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements

One of the drawbacks of simply searching the file description and title is that it can be very unreliable and can easily be used to vandalize. This means that searching for "whore", surfaces obvious vandalism like this , . The image of a famous woman being "shown in results" for whore, or a "molester" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Photo_of_molester.jpg, Carl_Sagan)

Proposed solutions:

1. Reduce the weight of the file description page - it can often be misleading and just plain bad especially on non-English wikis.
2. Add a reporting tool to make it easier for people to report / remove vandalism - this will also help get more eyes on commons, and potentially somewhat reduce their workload.
3. Prioritize media used locally in multimedia results - images used locally might be more relevant to the project and to the search.

We'll be launching the sister project snippets soon and based on a RfC on enwiki, we will not display the multimedia results on the English Wikipedia search results pages. You can test the new look by using this url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=~test&fulltext=1&cirrusUserTesting=recall_sidebar_results

Cheers!