Wikipedia:URLShortener

The official Wikimedia Foundation URL Shortener has been enabled since 11 April 2019, on Meta: Special:UrlShortener.

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, on wikis, or on paper.

The feature can be accessed from Meta-Wiki on the special page m:Special:URLShortener. 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  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 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 will this feature be available?
In order to enforce the rate limit described above, the page Special:URLShortener will only be enabled on Meta, and in the Wikidata Query Service.

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 and requests

 * If you have any question or requests, feel free to leave a comment under this Phabricator task.
 * 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. URLs on this domain act the same as on the English Wikipedia. For example, https://en-wp.org/wiki/Wikipedia:URLShortener will redirect to this page.