Is it common usage to have word-initial hyphens in Finnish? In English, it is not. The example New York -syndrooma doesn't look like normal language to my English-speaking, search-engine-loving eyes. A word initial hyphen looks like special syntax, which is how it's being treated here.

Queries with the more typical hyphens between words do get an option to create a page: i-like-hyphens, or English-speaking, search-engine-loving eyes.

I read the Finnish discussion in translation—so I didn't get all of it—but I did find the link discussed there: Eino Leino -palkinto, which translates to Eino Leino -award. Is that a common usage?

In T75355#2524185, @TJones wrote:

Is it common usage to have word-initial hyphens in Finnish?

Yes. If the first part of a Finnish compound consists of separately written words (e.g., "Eino Leino" in your example), we use a space and hyphen (or non-breaking hyphen) to separate the two parts. The spelling conventions are explained here (unfortunately only in Finnish): http://www.kielitoimistonohjepankki.fi/ohje/131

In T75355#2527895, @Silvonen wrote:

Yes. If the first part of a Finnish compound consists of separately written words (e.g., "Eino Leino" in your example), we use a space and hyphen

That's very interesting. In American English, copyeditors would use en dashes, and non-copyeditors would use regular connected hyphens—until their copyeditor corrected them.

I can see why it's causing problems on Finnish Wikipedia. Thanks for explaining/verifying/linking. It makes more sense now.

My first though is that the most reasonable fix would be to add a configuration parameter to control what elements of search syntax should be disallowed in titles that are recommended for article creation (instead of disallowing everything). Just allowing space+hyphen in titles everywhere would lead to complaints in the other direction from users whose writing conventions don't use hyphens that way.

I have a follow up question: do Finnish users want to use the hyphen as a negation marker? Searching for Eino Leino -palkinto gives an exact title match, which is fine, but adding an extra n as a typo—Eino Leinno -palkinto matches Eino Leino well enough, but prevents any match on palkinto, which seems bad. Or are people just used to that kind of thing?

A simpler solution might be to remove hyphens from the search syntax for Finnish Wikis. ! is still available for negation. On the other hand, Google Finland treats the space+hyphen as a negated search, and—for better or worse—Google tends to set the expectations for basic search syntax for unsophisticated users.

Since this uses the special syntax and we typically don't suggest making a page based on the special syntax, we're not sure if this needs to be done. Moving to the later column until we get more feedback.