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Wikipedia:Tools

Oh, you're looking for a list of tools. How quaint. As if clicking through endless links will magically imbue you with the competence to actually use them effectively. Fine. Don't say I never offered anything. Though, frankly, the fact that you even need this suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a useful editor, or perhaps just a reader with too much time on their hands.

List of tools and scripts for helping editors and readers

This page, affectionately (or perhaps cynically) known as WP:TOOLS, is a catalog of digital implements designed to lubricate the gears of Wikipedia. It’s a veritable Swiss Army knife for the aspiring, or already despairing, Wikipedian. Don't confuse it with Wikipedia:Toolforge, which is where the real heavy lifting happens, or the long-departed Wikipedia:Toolserver. If you're looking for a curated selection, try toolforge:admin/tools. For the truly lost, there's also Category:Wikipedia tools and the bewilderingly optimistic Optimum tool set. And if you can’t find what you need in this labyrinth, perhaps Toolhub might offer a sliver of hope.

Wikipedia, in its infinite complexity, offers a rather astonishing array of Wikipedia programming options, which can be broadly categorized. Think of them as the specialized appendages one might develop if they were to evolve within the digital ecosystem of this encyclopedia.

  • Bots: These are the tireless automatons, the digital ants that scurry about, performing tasks with a speed and consistency that would make a human weep. They fix formatting, update links, and generally clean up the mess we humans inevitably make.
  • Extensions: These are the built-in functionalities, the framework upon which Wikipedia itself is built. They're less about individual user magic and more about the underlying architecture.
  • Gadgets: Think of these as the user-friendly add-ons, the little conveniences that make the editing interface less of a medieval torture device. They’re often JavaScript-based and can be enabled in your preferences.
  • User scripts: This is where the real DIY spirit comes in. User scripts are custom-written JavaScript routines that can add virtually any functionality you can imagine. They are the power user’s secret weapon.
    • For a general overview, see the List.
    • If you're curious about what's popular, check the Ranking.
    • Need something specific? Post your Requests.
    • Feeling ambitious? Consult the Guide.
    • There's also a broader category of Other scripts, which might include things not strictly hosted as user scripts.
    • And if you’re really into scripts, you might even find a Newsletter dedicated to them.
  • Tools: This is the catch-all for standalone applications or web services that assist with Wikipedia tasks.

This entire document, mind you, is an information page. It’s not meant to be an encyclopedia article, nor is it a rigid Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Its purpose is to illuminate the arcane practices, the peculiar customs, and the baffling technicalities of this digital realm. Expect varying degrees of consensus and vetting.

You can find this page quickly with the shortcuts WP:TOOL or WP:TOOLS.

In essence, this page is a directory for the various tools and scripts that aim to streamline the editing process and enhance the experience for both editors and readers. It's a testament to the fact that, even in the pursuit of a free encyclopedia, people will still find ways to automate, optimize, and generally overcomplicate things.

Editor tools

These are the digital scalpels and wrenches for the Wikipedia surgeon.

  • Editing aids: For those who find the standard editor… lacking. This category includes a plethora of utilities designed to make the act of writing and formatting less of an exercise in futility.

    • Copyvio detector: To ensure you're not inadvertently plagiarizing. A noble, if often ignored, pursuit.
    • Alt text: For images, because accessibility isn't just a buzzword, it’s a necessity.
    • Peer review: A stepping stone for articles aspiring to greater heights.
    • Dab solver: Because confusing disambiguation pages is a cardinal sin.
    • Disambig links: A tool to hunt down those pesky, ambiguous links.
    • Redirect check: To ensure your links aren't just pointing to empty promises.

  • Citation tools: The bane of many an editor's existence, made slightly less painful.

    • Citer: To generate citations from bare URLs. A digital butler for your references.
    • Biomedical cite: For when your topic leans towards the… organic.
    • Citation bot: An automated assistant for the meticulous task of referencing.
    • Dup detector: To find those redundant references that clutter up your citations.
    • MakeRef: Another tool to help craft those elusive citations.
    • Refill: To, presumably, refill your citation arsenal.
    • WayBack: For when the internet, in its infinite impermanence, has moved on.
    • Web2Cit: Yet another way to digitize those web citations.

  • Things to review: For those who enjoy wading through the digital detritus.

    • Copyvios: Hunting down intellectual property theft. A thankless but necessary task.
    • New pages: The frontier of Wikipedia. Where new content, both brilliant and baffling, emerges.
    • New files: Images, sounds, and other media. The visual and auditory garnish.
    • Recent changes: The real-time pulse of Wikipedia. A chaotic symphony of edits.
    • IP edits: For the anonymous contributors, the ghosts in the machine.
    • Discussions: Where the arguments happen, the policies are debated, and sanity is often lost.

Customisation

This section, marked with the ubiquitous v, t, e template, is a gateway to personalizing your Wikipedia experience.

  • Browsing and editing:
    • wikEd: A comprehensive in-browser editor. Think of it as a souped-up text editor specifically for Wikipedia.
    • Editing tools: A broader category encompassing everything from simple formatting aids to complex bots.
    • Browser tools: Tailored for specific browsers.
    • Citation tools: As mentioned before, the tools for wrestling with references.
    • Anti-vandalism tools: For those who find joy in chasing digital vandals.
    • Alternative browsing: For accessing Wikipedia beyond the standard browser, like on mobile devices.
    • User scripts: The endlessly customizable JavaScript additions.
    • WatchlistBot: A bot that alerts you to changes on pages you monitor. Because apparently, real-time alerts are essential.
    • Help:Customizing toolbars: A way to personalize your sidebar for quick access to your favorite tools and articles.
    • Finding duplicated references: This is a specific problem, and the described tool, URL Extractor For Web Pages and Text, is external. The instructions for its use on Wikipedia are found at WP:DUPREF. Merging these is often a good idea.

Searching

Navigating the vast ocean of Wikipedia requires more than just a simple search bar.

  • See also: Help:Searching § Custom search boxes, and Category:Wikipedia search tools
  • GlobalWPSearch: Searches across all Wikimedia projects and flags missing links between languages. A truly global perspective.
  • macOS Dashboard Widget (deprecated): For those who cling to outdated operating systems.
  • whichsub: Finds templates transcluded on a page that contain specific text. Useful for those deep dives into template dependencies.
  • Find Link Tool: Created by Edward Betts, this tool helps locate links on Wikipedia. Simple, yet effective.
  • Wikimedia Global Search: This is the big one. It uses Elasticsearch to search the wikitext of all Wikimedia wikis. Requires a SUL login to prevent abuse, which is… understandable.
  • Insource search: A tool for finding specific terms or patterns across all Wikimedia wikis. Handy for bulk editing or research.

Google tools

Ah, Google. Even Wikipedia can't escape its shadow.

  • Citer for Google Books URL, DOI, ISBN, PMID, PMCID, OCLC: Converts bare identifiers into properly formatted citations. A necessary evil, perhaps. See also Help:Citation tools § Tools.
  • Mirrors of Wikimedia content: For Firefox users, the CustomizeGoogle extension can filter out those pesky mirror sites. Instructions are on meta:Mirror filter.

Google Slides

  • meta:User:Tbayer (WMF)/Converting Google Slides to wikitext (tutorial): A guide for transforming presentations into Wikipedia format.

Google Docs

  • meta:User:Tbayer (WMF)/Converting Google Docs to wikitext (tutorial + Python script): Similar to the Slides tutorial, but for documents.

Verification

  • verify: Flags potentially incorrect or uncited text by comparing article content to its citations. A digital fact-checker, of sorts.

Page histories

Delving into the past of a page.

  • General:

    • User:Ixfd64/revision sizes: A program for visualizing how page sizes change over time. Fascinating, if you're into that sort of thing.
    • Wikipedia:Wiki2VCS: A script to download page histories for local analysis. For the truly dedicated.

  • Finding the responsible user: For when you need to know who did what.

    • WikiBlame: Searches for specific text within article versions.
    • whoCOLOR: A browser script that highlights original authors directly in the article. Direct attribution, in real-time.
    • XTools Blame: Another tool to pinpoint who added specific wikitext.
    • Who Wrote That?: A browser extension that displays editor information as you mouse over text.

  • User edit counts and analysis: Understanding editor contributions.

    • See also: Category:Wikipedia contributor analysis tools
    • User contribution search: Finds all edits by a user on a single page.
    • Edit summary search: Filters edits based on keywords in the edit summary.
    • Wikipedia Page History Statistics: Builds an overview of edit history, including syntax and grammar checks.
    • XTools Pages Created: Lists all pages created by a user, including deleted ones.
    • afdstats: Analyzes Articles for deletion !votes.
    • Articles for Creation Review History: Shows a user's WP:AfC reviews.
    • User-level gender statistics: Analyzes gender demographics of article creators.
    • Look at your list of created articles through Wikidata: A way to track your creations via Wikidata.
    • Look at your list of created articles with the Xtools Page Prose API: Another method for tracking article creation.
    • Map your list of created articles through Wikidata: Visualizing your contributions geographically, perhaps?

  • Edit counters: Quantifying editing activity.

  • User interaction analysis: How editors interact with each other.

    • See also: Wikipedia:Tools/User interaction investigations
    • Editor Interaction Analyzer: Compares edits of 2-3 editors on English Wikipedia.
    • Intersect Contribs: Compares edits of 2-8 editors across any WMF wiki.
    • Intertwined contributions: Merges contributions of two editors into a single list.
    • Interaction Timeline: Chronological history of edits where two users both contributed.

  • Visualization: Making data visible.

    • Wiki Replay: Visualizes edits. See m:Grants:IEG/Replay Edits and wm2014:Submissions/Replay Edits for more details.
    • de:Benutzer:Atlasowa/edit history visualization: Another visualization tool, this one from the German Wikipedia.

Importing (converting) content to Wikipedia (MediaWiki) format

Bringing external content into the wiki.

  • See also: Wikipedia:How to import articles, Wikipedia:Tools/Editing_tools § Wikisyntax conversion utilities, and Help:Table § Converting spreadsheets and database tables to wikitable format
  • Google Docs Spreadsheet:
    • MediaWiki Table Utility (or its updated version): Converts spreadsheet data into MediaWiki tables. Defaults to Wikipedia styling.
  • Microsoft Office:
    • Word:
      • 2007 and later: Microsoft Office Word Add-in For MediaWiki (discontinued after Word 2013).
      • Prior versions: Macros available on mw:Word macros.
      • wikEd: Can also handle pasted content from Word.
    • Excel:
      • excel2wiki: Copy & Paste Excel-to-Wiki Converter.
      • tab2wiki: Converts tab-delimited tables to Wikitext.
      • de:Wikipedia:Technik/Text/Basic/EXCEL-Tabellenumwandlung/en: Converts Excel tables with formatting.
      • de:Benutzer:Duesentrieb/csv2wp (en) or CSV Converter: Converts various spreadsheet formats, including CSV, to MediaWiki or HTML.
      • csv2other: A .net tool for converting CSV and Excel to wiki table format.
  • OpenOffice/LibreOffice:
    • LibreOffice Writer: Can export directly to MediaWiki format. Tables can also be edited in LibreOffice Calc. See Commons:Convert tables and charts to wiki code or image files.
  • HTML:
    • Html2Wiki: A MediaWiki extension for importing HTML.
  • Python:
    • Table2wiki.py: Part of the Pywikipedia bot framework.
  • LaTeX:
  • CSV:

Export: Conversion to other formats

Getting Wikipedia content out in different forms.

  • Help:Export, Special:Export: For XML dumps.
  • Special:Book: For PDF generation.
  • mw:Alternative parsers: Various formats, including HTML and XML.
  • wikitable2csv: For CSV output.
  • mw:Extension:TextExtracts: HTML or plain text, without links.
  • meta:User:Tbayer (WMF)/Converting wiki pages to plaintext emails: For text conversion.
  • MediaWiki to LaTeX: For PDF, EPub, Odt, or LaTeX.
  • Wiki Embed Plugin: For WordPress integration.

Geotagging-related tools

Mapping Wikipedia content.

Gadget developers

Tools for those who build the tools.

  • Wikiblame: Useful for tracking when specific functions were introduced.
  • Wiki-to-Git: Downloads JS/CSS history to Git for development.
  • Wikiploy: Deploys gadgets to MediaWiki sites.
  • Global Search: Checks global usage of gadgets and functions.
  • Browser tools: Firefox DevTools, Chrome DevTools, for debugging and editing.

Contrast checking tools

Other

A miscellaneous collection of useful utilities.

  • Syndication: RSS feeds and the like.
  • Researching Wikipedia: Tools for data analysis.
  • Not English: For tools not yet translated.
  • Checklinks: Buggy, use with caution. Consider Internet Archive Bot instead.
  • WikiBiff: Alerts users to new messages.
  • Desktop Watchlist: An enhanced watchlist for Windows.
  • Category Watchlist: Monitors category additions/removals.
  • CategoryWatchlistBot: Similar to Category Watchlist, but automated.
  • PetScan (manual): Recursively searches categories.
  • User:SuggestBot: Suggests articles for editing.
  • RAMP editor: Generates authority records.
  • XEcho: Shows global cross-wiki notifications.
  • quarry:: Runs SQL queries on Wikimedia databases.
  • MTC!: Bulk file transfer to Commons.
  • Wiki Editor Plugin for Notepad++: Syntax highlighting for MediaWiki.
  • MediaWiker Plugin for Sublime Text: Similar functionality for Sublime Text.
  • MediaWiki Tables Generator (online): An online tool for creating tables.
  • Wikipedia:Get my IP address: For… well, getting your IP address.

See also

A rabbit hole of related links.

Honestly, it's a bit much, isn't it? All these tools, all these scripts, all this effort to make editing… easier. One would think the goal was to write an encyclopedia, not to build the most elaborate digital workshop imaginable. Still, if you must tinker, at least know what levers you're pulling. Just try not to break anything important.