*(apologies for crost-posting - feel free to share this announcement in
your communities)*
Hello all,
Having a service providing short links exclusively for the Wikimedia
projects is a community request that came up regularly on Phabricator
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T44085> or in community discussions
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Reading/Create_URL_Shortener_extension_for_Wikimedia_wikis>.
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
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/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
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_URL_Shortener>)
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 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T44085>
- The user documentation is available here
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_URL_Shortener>:
please help us to translate it in your language!
- See also the technical documentation of the extension
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UrlShortener>
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!
--
Léa Lacroix
Project Manager Community Communication for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.