Configuring MediaWiki to Search for Three Letter Words

By default MediaWiki uses MySQL and the default FULLTEXT indexing uses built-in stop words and a minimum word length of four. A list of the stop words is available but are the usual thing (the, and, one_, etc.). You can set your own stop words by setting the ft_stopword_file system variable but the default stop words may be sufficient to your purposes. However, there are many three letter words which you may like to index (_SVN, RSS, FAQ, etc.). In order to do this you need to change the FULLTEXT indexing to a minimum word length of three. To do this edit the my.ini and add to the end of the [mysqld] section:

ft_min_word_len=3[myisamchk]ft_min_word_len=3

Restart MySQL, and then reindex the relevant tables. The tables are ${mw_}searchindex where ${mw_} is the table prefix for the MediaWiki instance (there will be one searchindex table for each instance). To reindex the table, log into the server and start up MySQL Administrator. Log in as root and click Catalogs, then wikidb. Select the table and click the Maintenance button. Select Repair Tables and press Next. Check the Quick option under Repair Method and click Repair Tables. Repeat for each MediaWiki instance.