Toolforge: What It Is and How Wikipedia Editors Use It

When you edit Wikipedia, you might not realize how many behind-the-scenes tools help keep the site running. One of the most important is Toolforge, a free, open-source hosting platform provided by the Wikimedia Foundation for volunteers to build and run tools that automate tasks, analyze data, and improve editing workflows. Also known as Toolforge, it’s the engine behind many of the bots, scripts, and dashboards that make Wikipedia more accurate and easier to maintain. Unlike commercial cloud services, Toolforge is built by and for the Wikipedia community — no ads, no paywalls, just code that helps people edit better.

Toolforge isn’t a single app. It’s a whole ecosystem. Editors use it to run bots that catch vandalism, scripts that check citations, and dashboards that track article quality across hundreds of languages. For example, CirrusSearch, Wikipedia’s custom search engine, relies on Toolforge to process millions of queries daily. Tools built on Toolforge also help with TemplateWizard, a form-based tool that helps new editors create infoboxes and citations without learning wikitext, and The Signpost, the community-run newspaper that reports on Wikipedia outages and policy changes. These aren’t side projects — they’re essential infrastructure. Without Toolforge, many of the systems that keep Wikipedia clean, fast, and reliable would collapse.

Most users never see Toolforge directly, but they benefit from it every time they click ‘undo’ on a spam edit, get a suggestion for a missing citation, or see a live map of recent edits. It’s where coders, librarians, and data lovers come together to solve real problems — like fixing geographic bias in content or making mobile editing easier. The platform runs on open-source software, and anyone can contribute code, report bugs, or suggest improvements. You don’t need to be a developer to use its tools, but if you are, you can build something that helps millions of people find accurate information faster.

Below, you’ll find a collection of articles that show how Toolforge connects to the daily work of Wikipedia editors — from how bots fight spam, to how volunteers use data to fix content gaps, to how simple tools make editing possible on a phone. These aren’t just tech docs. They’re stories of real people using code to protect the world’s largest free encyclopedia.