Edit check offers people actionable feedback about Wikipedia policies while they are editing.

This page strives to equip experienced volunteers with the information they need to ensure Edit Check is configured in ways that will promote the nuances of each project's policies and conventions.

Edit Check can be configured in some ways on-wiki by local administrators by editing the MediaWiki:Editcheck-config.json message. This will be null initially, signifying that it is unconfigured and the Edit Check defaults should apply completely.

The message must be valid JSON , or it will be ignored and the defaults will be applied. Any unspecified values will be filled in with the default values.

A summary of the configuration of Edit Check on a given wiki can be found at Special:EditChecks.

This can apply to any check, unless otherwise stated in that check's section. It tends to address the meta level of check functionality: account types, experience level, parts of the document, etc.

If a parameter is not used in the local configuration, then its default value is used. Default values and their per-check overrides can be found on Special:EditChecks. All of the configuration items have to match in order for a check to show. E.g. Using both inCategory and hasTemplate in a check, would require both to be true for that check to appear.

Name Type Description Default
account Specify which account state the edit check should apply to. Valid values are "loggedin", "loggedout", false. The default false results in the edit check applying to all users. false
maximumEditcount Specify an upper bound for the number of changes at which Edit Check is activated. The default 100 means that the edit check will only be shown to users with 100 edits or fewer. If this value is not defined, the default value is used. The number of edits is based on user edit count, edits from all namespaces are taken into account. 100
minimumEditcount Specify a lower bound for the number of changes at which Edit Check is activated. The default 0 means that the edit check will be shown to all users. The number of edits is based on user edit count, edits from all namespaces are taken into account. 0
ignoreSections Array An array of section titles, which will be compared case-insensitively to headings. If a heading matches an item in this array, all content within that section will be ignored for checks.

Each section title has to be between ", separated by a ,: ["External links", "Unsupported claims", "Discussion"]. If an empty string is present, it refers to the lead section.

[]
ignoreLeadSection (deprecated) Boolean If true, the content of the lead section will be ignored for checks. A "lead section" is content that precedes the first heading in an article. An article without any headings doesn't have a lead section. false
includeSections Array or Boolean An array of section titles, which will be compared case-insensitively to headings. If a heading matches an item in this array, only content within those sections will be used for checks.

Each section title has to be between ", separated by a ,: ["External links", "Unsupported claims", "Discussion"].

If this is anything except an array, all sections will be included. An empty array ([]) would mean no sections would qualify. An array that contains only an empty string (['']) would mean to only include the lead section.

true
ignoreDisambiguationPages Boolean If true, this check won't run on disambiguation pages. false
ignoreQuotedContent Boolean If true, this check will try to not run on content that's within quotes, or within a blockquote. It determines this by checking whether the start of a potential match is a quote-character or is within a pair of quote-characters.[1] It will also not run on content within a single template.[2] If you're editing in English it will try to accommodate single-quotes, but trailing possessive apostrophes can confuse it. false
inCategory

notInCategory

Array If present, specifies an array of category-names whose presence or absence in the latest revision will determine whether a given check or suggestion has the potential to activate. This does not reflect the current state of the document in the editor. undefined
hasTemplate

lacksTemplate

Array If present, specifies an array of templates whose presence or absence in the document model will determine whether a given check or suggestion has the potential to activate. undefined
showAsCheck

showAsSuggestion

Boolean Whether to be shown as a check and/or suggestion. Checks are shown on content that the user has already edited in their edit session, while suggestions are shown with lower-priority across the entire article. true


The default configuration values are as follows: 

{
    "addReference": {
        "minimumCharacters": 50,
        "beforePunctuation": false,
        "account": false,
        "maximumEditcount": 100,
        "ignoreSections": [],
        "ignoreLeadSection": false
    }
}

Any of these values can be overwritten on the wiki if required. For example: 

{
    "addReference": {
        "minimumCharacters": 40,
        "beforePunctuation": true,
        "ignoreSections": [ "External links", "Unsupported claims", "Discussion" ],
        "ignoreLeadSection": true
    }
}

This would change the minimum number of characters required before the Reference Check triggers to 40, have it insert its citations before the terminal punctuation rather than after, and ignore content added within the lead section and several other listed sections.

Configurable values

[edit]

These are in addition to the generic configurable values listed above.

Name Default Description
beforePunctuation false Specify whether the citation should appear before or after a sentence's terminal punctuation. Before is the style used at the French Wikipedia: "Sentence[3]." After is the style used at the English Wikipedia: "Sentence.[3]". The default is false, resulting in the style used at most Wikipedias, including the English Wikipedia.
minimumCharacters 50 (As of 2023) The smallest string of consecutive characters[Footnotes 1] that will prompt a recommendation to add a citation. This should generally be small enough to trigger for most additions of significant new information, but big enough not to trigger for copyediting, in the local language.

These are in addition to the generic configurable values listed above.

Name Default Description
predictionThreshold 0.8 Specify the confidence score required from the model for a Tone Check to be shown, from 0.0 to 1.0.

This isn't quite "catch x% of tone violations", but rather "of the potential tone issues the model identifies, only show Tone Check to people when the model is ≥x% confident about its assessment."

The default is 0.8, which testing suggests aligns with edit-categorization by volunteers 95% of the time.

The TextMatch page has additional details on the textMatch feature, which can be used to create new entirely-local types of checks.

The special * config item can be used to set default values that apply to all other checks.

This example would set all checks to show only for logged in users, with less than 1,000,000 edits, and not in the "External links" and "References" sections. It then overrides that for the reference check, so it only shows for users with less than 10 edits. 

{
    "*": {
        "account": "loggedin",
        "maximumEditcount": 1000000,
        "ignoreSections": [ "External links", "References" ]
    },
    "addReference": {
        "maximumEditCount": 10
    }
}

The final config for any given check is built by combining the defaults for that check, the * values, and the specific values for that check. Later items will override earlier ones. The individual values are not merged, and will completely replace earlier ones.

These values can be set in the site-level configuration in LocalSettings.php.

Config Meaning Default
VisualEditorEditCheck Enables the feature false
VisualEditorEditCheckTagging Tags edits made related to edit check features false

"Checks" are shown when they relate to content that the editor has edited in their current editing session. When suggestion mode is enabled, "suggestions" will be shown across the entire article.

Suggestions ignore some of the account-level configuration above: they skip the account, maximumEditcount, and minimumEditcount configuration values.

A given edit check can be restricted to only appear in a certain mode with the showAsCheck and showAsSuggestion configuration values.

  • Any administrator at your wiki can configure this. You can find a list of admins on your wiki by searching for Special:ListAdmins.
  • If your wiki is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation but is not a Wikipedia, you will need to request that Edit Check be deployed at your wiki. Please follow the process at m:Requesting wiki configuration changes. Tag the Phabricator ticket with all the following tags: #editcheck, #wikimedia-site-requests.
  1. ↑ JavaScript characters, which are UTF-16 code units