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Help:Go button

From mediawiki.org
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The Go button is specific to the MonoBook skin. It appears on every MediaWiki page next to the Search button. It takes you directly to the page you type in the search field.

How it works

The Go button follows a series of conditional steps, each only proceeding if no match is found in the previous step. Here is a breakdown:

  1. Check if the page exists exactly as it's written, considering that systems treat the first character of the page name as case-insensitive. For example, if you type "sandbox" the system might still find Sandbox.
  2. Attempt with all lowercase: sandbox
  3. Attempt with a title case: Sandbox
  4. Attempt with all uppercase: SANDBOX
  5. If no matches are detected, the system conducts a complete text search as though you had manually initiated the search by clicking the Search button.

Usage

If you use the Go button smartly, you can quickly get to your favorite pages.

It's a good idea to use it for clear searches. If it doesn't find an exact match, it'll still do a regular search. But if it does, you'll go straight to where you want. A unique feature is that using Go with an IP address retrieves the user contributions linked to that specific IP address. See T306325.

Using existing redirects and namespace aliases can be helpful. For example, on Wikimedia projects, you can use "user:" instead of the longer localized version.