Wikipedia:Tools/Editing tools

General editing tools

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

Firefox addons

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 syntax. 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.

Mediawiki by Jake Boone

Mediawiki by Jason Williams (deprecated^[1] in favour of the Wikitext extension below)

Wikitext by Rowe Wilson Frederisk Holme

Wikitext v4.0.0)

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 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 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.

Request for program access should be made at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage
Make task requests at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks
Typo fixing request should be made at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos
Bugs should be reported on Phabricator
Feature Requests: Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature requests

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.

mw:Manual:Pywikibot

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

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

Navigation popups

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

From spreadsheet tables

User:Cacycle/wikEd editor extension functionality, see above
The de:Duesentrieb).
The HTML::WikiConverter Perl module (mentioned below) is also capable of table conversion.
A very simple Copy & Paste Excel-to-Wiki Converter
A free open source tool to convert from CSV and Excel files to wiki table format: csv2other
Spreadsheet-to-MediaWiki-table-Converter This class constructs a MediaWiki-format table from an Excel/GoogleDoc copy & paste. It provides a variety of methods to modify the style. It defaults to a Wikipedia styling with first column header.^[2]

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

Pandoc
Microsoft Office Word Add-in For MediaWiki: Converts Word documents to wiki formatting. Doesn't do images. This may not work on newer versions of Word.
Excel2Wiki tool for converting Excel tables to wiki tables.

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

html2wiki (magnustools.toolforge.org)
An AJAX interface for the HTML::WikiConverter http://labs.seapine.com/htmltowiki.cgi (remove HTML head if not working)
A browser based HTML to Wiki converter Emiliano Bruni's I love wiki – HTML2Wiki Converter (also using Perl module HTML::WikiConverter, remove HTML head if not working)

HTML::WikiConverter on the Toolserver: 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 (Ã„ instead of Ä), convert and restore original encoding (SciTe could help you doing the encoding conversions)

https://gwicke.github.io/paste2wiki/ : HTML paste supported, offers both HTML clean-up and converts to wikitext using Parsoid. Decent support for HTML from Google Docs and GMail.

To download

Pandoc
Html2Wiki is an extension for MediaWiki that imports HTML
HTML::WikiConverter http://search.cpan.org/~diberri/HTML-WikiConverter-0.61/.
User:Cacycle/wikEd editor extension functionality, see above
Another HTML to Wiki converter http://www.dwheeler.com/html2wikipedia/
A C++ based program also called Html2mediawiki

From LaTeX

LaTeX2wiki converts sections, math, and references using a web form.
Pandoc

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

Huggle (vandalism fighting tool)
RedWarn (user-friendly counter-vandalism tool)
AntiVandal (vandalism fighting tool)
Vandal Fighter (recent changes monitor)
Igloo (vandalism fighting tool)

Spell Checkers

User:Symplectic Map/AutoSpell
Mozilla Firefox offers built-in spell checking since version 2.0. Link to additional languages.
Opera 10 has built-in Hunspell spellchecker (before v10 can use GNU Aspell (textboxes only).
Google Toolbar offers spell checking in various languages for Internet Explorer.
A well-designed spell checker for Internet Explorer is ieSpell.
Konqueror uses Aspell if it's installed and set up in your KDE Control Center.
A good stand-alone spell checker for English Wikipedia pages is Inspyder InSite. (The free version is good enough for fixing Wikipedia articles.)
The macOS universal spell checker is available in Wikipedia's "edit this page" mode while using Safari and in theory any other Cocoa-based browser.
RegExTypoFix is a large set of regular expressions meant to be loaded into AutoWikiBrowser to do automatic spellchecking.
Google Chrome contains a built-in spell checker as well.
Wikipedia:Correct typos in one click, a tool that identifies typos within English Wikipedia and gives a interface to correct them easily.
Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss runs a communal spell check on database dumps

Article maintenance

WPCleaner (various syntax fixes)
WP:reFill (expands bare references)
Reflinks (check and correct links in references)
Dabfix (unavailable) (maintenance of disambiguation pages)
Dab solver (links to disambiguation pages)
Checklinks (unavailable) (check and correct other links)
ProveIt (addition of citations and references)
Open access bot (add open access links to citations)
MW (Firefox Ubiquity script. It uses the MediaWiki API to suggest and insert an internal link.)

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

Interwiki link checker

[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: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

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

vfd_NavBar

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

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

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

v t e Wikipedia technical help
Get personal technical help at the Teahouse, help desk, village pump (technical), talk pages or IRC.
General technical help	Browser notes Bypass cache Keyboard shortcuts Editing CharInsert Edit conflict Edit toolbar Reverting How to create a page IRC Tutorial Mobile access Multilingual support Page history Page information Page name Help Printing Software notices Editnotice Special Characters Entering User access levels VisualEditor Help
Special page-related	Special page help AllPages Edit filter Emailing users Logging in Reset passwords Logs Moving a page History merging Non-admin and admin-only page moves Notifications/Echo FAQ Page Curation Page import Pending changes Random pages Recent changes Related changes Searching Linksearch Tags User contributions Watchlist What links here
Wikitext	Wikitext Cheatsheet Columns Line-break handling Lists Magic words For beginners Conditional expressions Switch parser function Time function Redirects Sections and TOCs Tables Introduction Basics Advanced table formatting Collapsing Conditional tables Sortable tables Using colours
Links and diffs	Links Interlanguage Interwiki Permanent Diffs Simplest diff guide Simple diff and link guide Complete diff and link guide Colon trick Link color Pipe trick URLs
Media files: images, videos and sounds	Media help Files Creation and usage Moving files to Commons Images Introduction to images Picture tutorial Preparing images for upload Uploading images Options to hide an image Extended image syntax SVG help Gallery tag Graphics tutorials Basic bitmap image editing How to improve image quality Graphics Lab resources Sound file markup Visual file markup
Other graphics	Family trees Graphs and charts How to create Barcharts To scale charts Math formulas Math symbols Musical scores Musical symbols Timeline EasyTimeline syntax WikiHiero syntax
Templates and Lua modules	Templates Advanced template coding Template documentation Template index Template limits Template sandbox and test cases Citation templates Lua help Lua project Resources To do Substitution Purge Job queue Transclusion Labeled section Costs and benefits Guide to Scribbling
Data structure	Namespaces Main/Article Category Draft File File description page Help Portal Project/Wikipedia Talk Archiving Simple Template User User page design MediaWiki Bug reports and feature requests TimedMediaHandler extension Module Special
HTML and CSS	Cascading Style Sheets HTML in wikitext Catalogue of CSS classes Common.js and common.css User CSS for monospaced coding font Classes in microformats Markup validation Span tags Useful styles
Customisation and tools	Preferences Gadgets Skins Citation tools Cleaning up vandalism tools Customizing watchlists Hide pages IRC Scripts User scripts Guide List Techniques User style Tools Alternative browsing Browser tools Editing tools Navigation shortcuts Optimum tool set Wikimedia Cloud Services Beta Features at MediaWiki
Automated editing	AfC helper script AntiVandal AutoWikiBrowser Bots Creating history HotCat Huggle Navigation popups RedWarn Twinkle Ultraviolet WPCleaner Inactive igloo STiki
See also: Category:Wikipedia how-to Category:Wikipedia information pages Further navigation at: Help pages Administrators Accessibility Accounts Bots Referencing Citation metadata Templates User scripts