Hello all,

Having a service providing short links exclusively for the Wikimedia projects is a community request that came up regularly on Phabricator or in community discussions.

After a common work of developers from the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany, we are now able to provide such a feature, it will be enabled on April 11th on Meta.

What is the URL Shortener doing?

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.

The feature can be accessed from Meta wiki on the special page m:Special:URLShortener (will be enabled on April 11th). On this page, you will be able to enter any web address from a 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 an example: w.wiki/3 redirects to wikimedia.org.

What are the limitations and security measures?

In order to assure the security of the links, and to avoid shortlinks 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, the Wikidata Query Service, Phabricator. (see the full list here)

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, and the IPs are limited to 10 creations per 2 minutes.

Where will this feature be available?

In order to enforce the rate limit described above, the page Special:URLShortener will only be enabled on Meta. You can of course create links or redirects to this page from your home wiki.

The next step we’re working on is to integrate the feature directly in the interface of the Wikidata Query Service, where bit.ly is currently used to generate short links for the results of the queries. For now, you will have to copy and paste the link of your query in the Meta page.

Documentation and requests

• If you have any question or requests, feel free to leave a comment under this Phabricator task
• The user documentation is available here: please help us to translate it in your language!
• See also the technical documentation of the extension

Thanks a lot to all the developers and volunteers who helped moving forward with this feature, and making it available today for everyone in the Wikimedia projects!