The annual Coolest Tool Award celebrated software tools created and used by the Wikimedia community. Here are this year’s winners.

By André Klapper, Staff Developer Advocate, The Wikimedia Foundation

Wiki communities around the globe have diverse use cases and technical needs. Volunteer developers are often the first to experiment with new ideas, build local and global solutions and enhance the experience in our software. The Coolest Tool Award aims to acknowledge that, and make volunteer developers’ work more visible.

The third edition of the Coolest Tool Award took place on 14 January 2022. The event was live streamed on Youtube in the MediaWiki channel. The video is also available on Wikimedia Commons. The award was organized and selected by the Coolest Tool Academy 2021 and friends, based on nominations from our communities.

In total, ten tools were awarded in the categories listed below, and four more tools received honorable mentions. A tool is a piece of software used in the Wikimedia ecosystem. Examples for tools include gagdets, MediaWiki extensions, websites, web services, APIs, applications, bots, or user scripts.

Thank you for all your work! 🎉

2021 winners

Experience — Intuitive and easy to use

WikiShootMe is a map of images and geographical locations that helps you find points of interest that need photos. It is both intuitive but also powerful, and it works well on both desktop and mobile.

To quote from a nomination, “I often show this tool to newcomers. It really helps them understand Wikidata and the relationship with Wikimedia Commons.”

Developer — Tools that primarily serve developers

Quarry is a public interface to query replica databases of public Wikimedia wikis, via a web browser. You can also share your queries with others.

Newcomer — New tools or tools by new developers

GlobalWatchlist shows your watched pages across all wikis on a single page.

Diversity — Tools that help include a variety of people, languages, cultures

Humaniki allows to explore the gender gap in content of Wikimedia projects by dimensions such as country, language, or date of birth.

Quality — Tools to improve content quality

Depictor is a game for filling in the gaps of Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons by adding depicts statements to images. It is mobile friendly and a fun way to make image search better.

Tiny — Small tools and tools that do one thing well

diffedit is a user script that enables editing directly from viewing the differences between two versions of the same wiki page. It is very useful for patrolling.

Versatile — Tools that support multiple workflows

Convenient Discussions is a user script that allows the user to post and edit comments without switching to a separate page. You do not need to search code for wiki markup, read talk pages through diffs, or deal with edit conflicts.

Reusable — Serves many wikis and projects

Wudele lets you quickly schedule a poll or an event by setting up potential options and letting others vote on the best time or choice.

Editor — Tools that augment editing

PAWS is a Jupyter notebook deployment. It allows to create and share documents which contain live code. You can run scripts that help with creating visualizations or write technical documentation and tutorials that help others.

Eggbeater — Tools in use for more than 10 years

Earwig’s Copyvio Detector finds possible copyright violations in Wikipedia articles by searching the web, following the article’s links, and checking with external image databases. It is multilingual and an essential tool for maintaining Wikipedia’s quality.

Honorable mentions

• CopyPatrol allows identifying recent copyright violations on several Wikimedia projects.
• MediaWiki CLI makes it easy to set up a MediaWiki instance, services for development purposes, and to run many integration tools.
• VizQuery lets you query Wikidata by property and property value. It offers autocomplete and the search results show images.
• And for WBStack, let’s quote one of its users: “The true promise of Wikidata comes from the ability to build a federation of Wikibases all using the same data primitives, and WBStack is making that promise a reality by letting anyone create a fully functioning Wikibase at the press of a button.”

Big thanks to everyone who nominated their favorite tools, everyone who contributed code, and everyone who spread the word about the Coolest Tool Award!

For more details on the awarded projects, please see the Coolest_Tool_Award/2021 page.

andré — for the 2021 Coolest Tool Academy