Wikipedia:URL Shortener
Project page about Wikimedia's official URL shortening service
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The official Wikimedia Foundation URL Shortener is at: Special:UrlShortener.
 | This is an information page. It is neither an encyclopedia article nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting. |
What is the URL Shortener doing?
The Wikimedia URL Shortener is a feature that allows you to create short URLs for any page on certain projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to reuse them elsewhere, for example on social networks, on wikis, or on paper.
The feature can be accessed on all WMF wikia on the special page Special:URLShortener and its equivalents. On those pages, you will be able to enter any web address from an allowed service hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, to generate a short URL, and to copy it and reuse it anywhere.
The format of the URL is w.wiki/ followed by a string of letters and numbers. You can already test this, for example:
- https://w.wiki/3 redirects to wikimedia.org
- https://w.wiki/3qq redirects to Wikipedia:Notability.
What are the limitations and security measures?
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 services hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. This includes for example: all Wikimedia projects, Meta, mediawiki.org, the Wikidata Query Service, Phabricator (full list here).
- Only links shorter than 2,000 characters can be shortened.
In order to avoid abuse of the tool, there is a rate limit:
- Logged-in users can create up to 50 links every 2 minutes.
- IPs are limited to 10 creations per 2 minutes.
Where can I use short URLs?
In addition to using short URLs on social media, and on paper, they can be used for Wikidata queries.
Documentation, bugs and requests
- If you have any bugs to report or features to request, feel free to open a ticket on Phabricator, at w.wiki/p.
- The user documentation is available.
English Wikipedia-specific shorteners
The Wikimedia Foundation also maintains shorteners specific to the English Wikipedia at en-wp.org and en-wp.com.[1] URLs on this domain act the same as on the English Wikipedia. For example, https://en-wp.org/wiki/Wikipedia:URL_Shortener will redirect to this page.