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Wikipedia:Tools/Editing tools

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Editor tools
Editing aids
Citation tools
Things to review
Customisation

General editing tools

Screenshot of wikEd, a full-featured in-browser text editor

Tools which don't assist with a specific kind of edits, but just whatever edits the user is making.

Firefox addons

See also: Wikipedia:Tools/Browser tools/Mozilla Firefox and Category:Wikipedia browser extensions

There are always a lot of different addons for editing or reading Wikipedia, sometimes not so stable or not so long lasting, but you can likely find some that will help you seriously.

Available at mozilla.org.

QuickWikiEditor

With this Firefox-add-on it is possible to make little edits to wiki-articles without having to leave or reload the page, so the flow in reading an article is barely disturbed.

Available now addons.mozilla.org.

wikEd

wikEd is a full-featured, in-browser text editor that adds enhanced text processing functions to Wikipedia and other MediaWiki edit pages (currently Mozilla, Firefox, SeaMonkey, Safari, and Chrome only).

Features include:

  • Pasting formatted text, e.g. from MS-Word (including tables)
  • Converting the formatted text to wikicode
  • Wikicode syntax highlighting
  • Regular expression search and replace and find-as-you-type
  • Server-independent Show preview and Show changes
  • Fullscreen editing mode
  • Single-click fixing of common mistakes
  • History for summary, search, and replace fields
  • Search/replace box that supports regular expressions.

Offline MediaWiki Code Editor

Offline MediaWiki Code Editor is a multilingual freeware offline application programmed in AutoHotkey script language for those Windows® users who edit articles in Wikipedia and other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. It includes tools and assistants with a simple and intuitive user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) which helps the user to generate much of the MediaWiki code. Among other gifts the assistants help the user to:

  • Apply list style
  • Build links
  • Split in columns
  • Insert special characters
  • Insert inline references
  • Insert images
  • Insert image galleries
  • Insert tables
  • Browse/Concatenate files
  • Compare versions of a document
  • Convert to HTML and preview
  • Two-windows mode

The application makes easier and faster the edition of articles, even if the user lacks previous knowledge of the markup rules. It helps to prevent mistakes during the process of edition, and to pay less attention to the sintax. Although the application program was designed for users with no previous knowledge of the MediaWiki language, it is also useful for experts, once it saves time and reduces the possibility of typing errors. Although is not a visual editor, it offers the possibility to test offline most of your code in your default web browser. This tests simulate the behavior that would show the wiki code in a Wikipedia page. The installer may be downloaded free from the Offline MediaWiki Code Editor site.

Both the installer and the application interface are available in English, Spanish, German and French. Last update (October 13, 2024) can be downloaded from here.

Visual Studio Code Plugins for Wikipedia and Mediawiki

The following plugins are available in Visual Studio Code for syntax highlighting and some additional features to help edit Wikipedia and Mediawiki pages and projects, including adding web citations.

Sublime Text Mediawiker

Mediawiker is a plugin for the Sublime Text editor that permits transparent opening, editing, and saving of MediaWiki pages within the editor itself. It is based on MWClient and supports syntax highlighting, completions, history, bookmarks, notifications, templates, and more.

Text comparison and edit merging

See Comparison of file comparison tools.

The most popular are probably Meld and Kompare (both cross-platform, free/libre open source software).

syncwiki

https://git.sr.ht/~enterprisey/syncwiki. Upload and download text files as Wikipedia pages.

WikiFundi

WikiFundi is a freely-licenced offline wiki editing environment based on MediaWiki, and thus mimics the familiar Wikipedia environment. It facilitates wiki-based teaching and content creation where internet access and electricity are expensive, intermittent, or unreliable.

It was realized by the Wiki in Africa association in collaboration with Wikimedia CH and Kiwix (Anthere, Emmanuel Engelhard (Kelson), Florent Kaisser, Renaud Gaudin, Tonygarfume and other members of the community).

WikiFundi needs a small portable local server to work; for example, a Raspberry Pi. It can be used by an individual, but was designed to help groups and communities to learn how to edit Wikipedia, and work on articles collaboratively. It is being used for education programs within schools such as the WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique.

Multiple languages are supported, including French, English, and Spanish. For more information, including instructions for downloading and use, see m:WikiFundi/en (most up to date) or its website http://www.wikifundi.org.

Semi-auto edit bots

AutoWikiBrowser

AutoWikiBrowser – (Windows platform) Makes repetitive, tedious edits such as spell checkings or category moves faster and easier.

CSVLoader

CSVLoader is an AutoWikiBrowser plug-in that allows creating and updating articles using CSV data files.

mwpush

mwpush.pl is a Perl script which takes a Wikified text file or input and submits it to a target MediaWiki page.

PyAutoWikiBrowser

PyAutoWikiBrowser (PyAWB) is an editing assist tool for MediaWiki similar to AWB, but since it is written in Python, it is intended to be cross-platform. Currently it is under development, but it is available for testing as a command line tool. While in beta please restrict editing to your own userspace, or preferably, sign up at Test Wiki and use that. Enter the project test (not Wikipedia) and language test when running make.py to set up the software.

Pywikibot

Useful for creating bots, or for interactive repair of interwiki links.

DotNetWikiBot

DotNetWikiBot has an option to review and change each edit in Microsoft Word before saving it to live wiki. DotNetWikiBot is a client API on .NET, intended for building bots for MediaWiki sites.

Relink.pl is a Perl5 script that relinks wikitext. It removes red links, given a list of titles that it generates from the raw wikitext. It can also add links given a list of words to link. It will report link counts, how many times each link occurs, and the total number of outgoing links.

Information display

Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups gives a popup box containing the first paragraph of an article when hovering over a link; it also allows quick access to common editing operations. If the wiki provides the NavPop gadget, it can be enabled in user preferences under the gadgets tab. Otherwise, installed by editing the user's skin.js file.

Alternative preview

Alex Smotrov's QPreview adds an edit toolbar button that uses XMLHttpRequest to generate page preview without reloading the whole page. QPreview functionality has also been added to the wikEd editor tool.

WikiCheck watchlist tool

WikiCheck is a small tool to make checking your watchlist easier. Docked to the left screen edge it shows a list of changes that occurred since the last time the list was checked. Clicking on a change will open the corresponding diff in a new browser window. Recently rewritten.

Wikisyntax conversion utilities

See also: Wikipedia:Tools § Importing (converting) content to Wikipedia (MediaWiki) format, Wikipedia:How to import articles, and commons:Commons:Chart and graph resources

From spreadsheet tables

From OpenOffice and LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice provides MediaWiki export functionality. The package libreoffice-wiki-publisher needs to be installed.
  • Writer2MediaWiki: OpenOffice macro for converting to MediaWiki format
  • Pandoc

From any productivity suite

  • VisualEditor, the WYSIWYG editor deployed on multiple Wikipedias allows for the copying/pasting of content from Word documents into a wiki page. Most formatting is kept intact - including tables. However, images and advanced formatting will need to be cleaned up upon import. For testing: mw:Project:Sandbox.
  • User:Cacycle/wikEd editor extension functionality, see above

From Microsoft Word

  • Transferring a single wiki page in MediaWiki to Word is easy, just save the desired webpage and then open the page in Microsoft Word.

From HTML

Online, no installation required
Note: You must change the "Wiki dialect" to MediaWiki or it won't work properly. You can enter a url to convert a web page. It is based on the Perl module HTML::WikiConverter which performs HTML→wiki conversion and is available on CPAN. (by en:Diberri). This converter can fetch a URL instead of pasting the html.
Tip: If you receive no conversion but an "Internal Server Error" or nothing at all, the HTML source may be too large
Tip: If you experience problems with non-ASCII characters, paste UTF-8 code as ASCII (Ä instead of Ä), convert and restore original encoding (SciTe could help you doing the encoding conversions)
To download

From LaTeX

From source codes

  • Wikipedia supports syntax highlighting. For information on how to use it, and the languages supported, see Syntax Highlight Extension.

Upload tools

See commons:Commons:Upload tools.

Miscellaneous editing tools

Twinkle

Twinkle is a popular JavaScript Wikipedia gadget that gives autoconfirmed registered users many extra options to assist them in common Wikipedia maintenance tasks and to help them deal with acts of vandalism or unconstructive edits. It provides users with three types of rollback functions and includes a full library of speedy deletion functions, user warnings and welcomes, maintenance tags, semi-automatic reporting of vandals, and more. In addition, it gives administrators more tools to help them carry out their duties.

RecentChanges tools

Spell Checkers

Article maintenance

Additional tools which use OAuth can be found on Special:Tags.

Disambiguation fixer

Disambiguation fixer is a program to fix the links to Disambiguation pages. (See Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links)

Regex: change heading levels

The following may seem trivial for Unix-experienced people, but a collection of ready-to-use regular expressions can help people who don't know anything or much about regular expressions. For these people: You can use regular expressions in many editors to perform complex editing tasks.

This will give the headings more (or fewer) equal signs (=). I can only provide a version which is verified to work in Eclipse, but it will work in many text editors which feature Unix-style regular expressions.

Please change the expressions only if you are very, very sure that it will work correctly, say you have tested that it works.

Verified in Eclipse

Search-string: 

^=(=*?)([^=]+?)(=*?)=\s*$

For more equal signs replace with: 

==$1$2$3==

For fewer equal signs replace with: 

$1$2$3

To balance right equals signs to left: 

=$1$2$1=

Hints for text editors not mentioned

In other editors, the replace strings will have to be different:

For more equal signs replace with: 

==\1\2\3==

For less equal signs replace with: 

\1\2\3

Units of measure formatting and conversion tool and date formatting tool

User:MJCdetroit/monobook.js is a monobook tool that allows many common units to be correctly formatted (e.g. km² and not sq km) and converted between metric and imperial/U.S. customary systems with one click on a 'units' tab in edit mode.

Dates can be delinked and common errors associated with can be corrected with one click on a 'dates' tab in edit mode.

Units and dates can be combined by clicking the 'combined' tab in the edit mode.

To avoid false positives, editors can/should review the changes offered and accept or reject the changes offered and/or do more editing before pressing 'Save'. Simply add importScript("User:MJCdetroit/monobook.js"); to your own monobook. Follow the instructions in your monobook to clear the cache (i.e., press Ctrl+⇧ Shift+R in Firefox or Ctrl+F5 in Internet Explorer) before it will work. —MJCdetroit (yak) 20:32, 21 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Labelled Image Editor

The Labelled Image Editor is a Java tool that creates and edits labelled links for an image. Useful for creating clickable maps like Template:United States Labelled Map. http://mujibab.googlepages.com/labelledimageeditor

Obsolete

  • [1] to interwiki articles in different languages which ought to have a link.

Go-to-edit-page contextual menu item

  • This script for a Firefox extension allows one to go directly to the edit page of a right-clicked wiki page link (control-clicked on a Macintosh one-button mouse).

Timeline creation tool

For a tool to create nice graphical timelines, see meta:Wikipedia Project Time Charts and the Easy Timeline Homepage. (by meta:Erik Zachte)

Extra edit page buttons

For extra edit page buttons, put the following code in your skin.js: {{js|User:MarkS/extraeditbuttons.js}}. The buttons include: left aligned text, sub-script, super-script, insert table, insert quoted text. More details can be found at User:MarkS/Extra edit buttons.

Wiki Welcome

// A small piece of JS written by [[User:MatthewFenton]], This is my first piece of JS.
function welcome() {
    if (document.title.indexOf('Editing User talk:') == 0) {
        document.editform.wpTextbox1.value = document.editform.wpTextbox1.value + '==' +
          'Welcome' + '==\n' + '{{subst:User:' + 'MatthewFenton/Welcome}}\n~~' + '~~';
        document.editform.wpSummary.value = 'Welcome a user to Wikipedia using JS WW';
    }
}
function welcome_tab() {
    add_link('javascript:welcome()', 'Welcome');
}

if (document.title.indexOf('Editing User talk:') == 0) {
 addOnloadHook(welcome_tab);
}

The code adds a tab when you are on user talk pages, you can then click it to add a welcome template and then save. A little time saver for me I thought I would share. Matthew Fenton (contribs) 16:25, 12 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Footnote renumbering tool

The templates {{fn}} and {{fnb}} were deleted in March 2010. This tool is no longer useful on the English Wikipedia.

If you have a page with many footnotes using {{fn}} and {{fnb}}, and they're all in the wrong order, this script could be useful. Written in Python, tested on a Linux system with Python 2.4.

User:Skagedal/Footnote renumbering tool

Decision-making processes

See also: Category:Wikipedia consensus tools

vfd_NavBar

This section is an excerpt from User:Sanbeg/vfd NavBar.[edit]

User:Sanbeg/vfd NavBar.js is a modified version of the experimental navigation bars. This will hide closed discussions in the AFD & AFC pages, but not in the AFD sub pages (where there's only 1 discussion) and allows you to toggle them individually.

AFD tools

note : AFD stands for Articles For Deletion

Add the following to your monobook.js file

Code for "AFD" to be added to your monobook.js
function hidevfd(){
    var divs = document.getElementsByTagName("div");
    for(var x = 0; x < divs.length; ++x)
        if(divs[x].className.indexOf("vfd") != -1)
            divs[x].style.display = "none";
    document.getElementById('footer').style.display = 'none';
}

function showvfd(){
    var divs = document.getElementsByTagName("div");
    for(var x = 0; x < divs.length; ++x)
        if(divs[x].className.indexOf("vfd") != -1)
            divs[x].style.display = "";
    document.getElementById('footer').style.display = '';
}

function addlilink(tabs, url, name){
    var na = document.createElement('a');
    na.href = url;
    na.appendChild(document.createTextNode(name));
    var li = document.createElement('li');
    li.appendChild(na);
    tabs.appendChild(li);
    return li;
}

function vfdlinks(){
    var tabs = document.getElementById('p-cactions').getElementsByTagName('ul')[0];
    if(document.title.indexOf("Wikipedia:Articles for deletion") == 0){
        addlilink(tabs, 'javascript:hidevfd()', 'Hide');
        addlilink(tabs, 'javascript:showvfd()', 'Show');
    }
}

if (window.addEventListener) window.addEventListener("load",vfdlinks,false);
else if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent("onload",vfdlinks);
Added by ABCD
This should be improved by saving a 7-day cookie as to the hidden or shown status of each VFD --jnothman talk 02:01, 2 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Afd helper

A script to speed up voting on AFDs. See afd helper. Feedback needed.

CSDHelper

A Greasemonkey script to add a menu with common WP:CSD criteria next in the form that appears when deleting articles. It saves time and provides more meaningful deletion reasons in the logs. Can be included directly into monobook.js with basic modification. It is available at User:Chairboy/csdhelper.greasemonkey.js. Wikipedia administrator access required.

AFD Organizer

Main page: User:Jayden54/AFD Organizer

An application used in AFD discussions. Loads a list of all the recent AFD's, and then pre-loads several useful pages when opening an AFD, saving valuable time and energy.

Image tagging tools

Script for quickly tagging images as lacking source, licensing, or fair use rationale. Also simplifies nominating images for deletion:

User talk:Howcheng/quickimgdelete.js

Notes

  1. ^ Williams, Jason. "README.md". Retrieved 2021-09-17 – via GitHub.
  2. ^ http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/55686

See also

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