Wikimedia URL Shortener
The Wikimedia URL Shortener is a feature that allows you to create short URLs for any page on projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to reuse them elsewhere, for example on social networks or on wikis.
How to use it?
The feature can be accessed from Meta wiki on the special page Special:URLShortener.
On that special page, you can enter any web address from a service hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation (see list below). Click on Shorten to generate a short URL. You can then copy it and reuse it anywhere.
The format of the URL is w.wiki/ followed by a string of letters, numbers or a few other special characters.
Depending on the website you're using it on, you may have to add the prefix https:// to have it recognized as a link. For example, on wikis, w.wiki/A is not recognized as a link but https://w.wiki/A is.
On your wiki, you can create a template to display the links as internal links, see for example Template:Short URL on English Wikipedia.
List of supported sites
In order to assure the security of the links, and to avoid short links pointing to external or dangerous websites, the URL shortener is restricted to specific services hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. This includes:
- All Wikimedia content projects (Wikipedias, Wikidata, Commons, Wiktionaries, etc.)
- Meta (https://meta.wikimedia.org)
- MediaWiki wiki (https://www.mediawiki.org)
- Wikidata Query Service (https://query.wikidata.org)
- Diff blog (https://diff.wikimedia.org)
- Phabricator (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org)
- Collaborative pad service (https://etherpad.wikimedia.org)
- Gerrit (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org)
Existing short links
When you shorten a link, the system will check it against the links that already exist in the database, to avoid duplicates. If you try to shorten a link that already has been shortened by someone else, the system will not create a new URL but return the existing shortlink.
Some links have been already created, redirecting to some of our projects.
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Security
This feature has been designed to provide to the Wikimedia editors a secure way to shorten and share links.
- The URL shortener only accepts links that are in some select Wikimedia Foundation controlled domains, so no external website can be linked
- Users or IPs who cannot edit Meta-Wiki (blocked) are not allowed to create short URLs
- If there's a severe case of information disclosure, stewards can delete a short URL
- Abuse prevention has been added: the rate limit is 10 creations per 2 minutes for IPs and 50 for logged-in users.