Searching Wikisource

One of the main benefits of hosting texts on Wikisource is the ability to search not just titles of texts, but also phrases and names within texts easily.

You can search Wikisource for specific texts, or texts by specific authors or texts that have specific words or phrases within their titles or bodies.

• Searching can also be done with special pages, mostly the Special:Search page, or by an external search engine like Google.
• The search box available at the top right of every page uses Special:Search.

You can browse by subject on Wikisource using Categories and Portals.

Portals

Portals usually list texts related to a specific topic (Providing more info than category searches) e.g. Portal:religious texts.

Portals are listed in the header of a work. These link to a portal page, which is a user-written list of all works on Wikisource on that subject. The portal may also link to other portals on similar subjects and it will be categorised like any other page. The list of works in a portal can be in whatever order the creator of the portal, or future editors, thought would be best to display those works. For example, Portal:Physics shows all the pages on the subject of Physics.

Categories

Categories are listed at the bottom of each page. These link to a category page, which will show an automatically-generated list of all of the pages on Wikisource in that subject. At the bottom of the category page will be links to other categories. This list will be in alphabetical order. For example, Category:Physics shows all the pages in the Physics category.

Prefix search

If you have the start of the title of the page, you can use Special:PrefixIndex instead to search for all works that begin in a certain way.

Searching Wikisource with Google

If you want to use an external search engine, remember to limit the results to Wikisource. For example, if using Google, add the text “site:en.wikisource.org”  to your search.

Random search

It is also possible to jump to a random item by using the special page Special:Random. This will link to any page on Wikisource, not just works in the library.

Special:Randomrootpage will exclude subpages. This can be changed to pick random pages from specific namespaces, such as: Special:Random/Author or Special:Random/Category.