Help:Go button

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The Go button appears on all MediaWiki pages in the standard skin, next to the search button. The function of the go button is to display a page directly, instead of first having to select it from the search result page. In other words, it allows you to quickly navigate from page to page without following links.

Use

To view a page, just enter its name in the search field and click "Go". The Go button is more complex than it looks. It works as follows (each time, only continuing if there is no match):

1. Check existence of the page exactly as it is entered, e.g. Test Page and Test page are different pages (but most projects have case-insensitivity of the first character of the whole page name, and in the case of a namespace prefix, of the first character after that).
2. Try all lower case (with the first letter capitalized), e.g. if you type "TEST PAGE", Test page and not Test Page would be displayed.
3. Try the version with all words capitalized.
4. Try the all upper case version.
5. Try a case insensitive title search that also matches partial page titles. If there are several matches, priority is as follows: 1) main namespace, 2) talk pages for main namespace, 3) user pages, 4) user talk pages, 5) {project name}* pages, 6) {project name} talk pages, 7) image pages, 8) image talk pages. That is, for example, if both a talk page with the title and a normal page exist, the normal page is viewed.
   • Stopwords are ignored in this title search.
   • Prefixes like "User:" and "{project name}:" are currently treated as words in the title search, but not in the previous matching routines, where they are treated as proper namespace prefixes.
6. Carry out a full text search as if you clicked the "Search" button; see Help:Searching.

If you use the Go button wisely, it will allow you to quickly jump to your most frequently used pages. It is also a good idea to use it for unambiguous searches -- if a direct match fails, it will always fall back to the normal search anyway, and if it succeeds, you are immediately taken where you want to go. In general, the go button generates little server load, and therefore usually remains functional even if the fulltext search is deactivated for performance reasons.

Special features

A special feature is that applying Go on an IP number gives the User contributions of that IP.

Depending on the contents of MediaWiki:Nogomatch there may be a link to the edit page of the non-existent page, see e.g. w:MediaWiki:Nogomatch. A useful side-effect is that this allows going conveniently to a page on another wiki, by adding the interwiki prefix, albeit that the text "create an article with this title" would not be accurate for the link, in the case of an existing page. Also the CSS-class of the link is "new", not "ex4tiw".

*This is a parameter you set while configuring MediaWiki.

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