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Wikipedia:WPCleaner/FAQ

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WPCleaner – 2.05 (August 26, 2022 (2022-08-26)) [±]
WPCleaner

General information about WPCleaner

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Discuss the application

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Suggestions for spelling and typography

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Installation

Install instructions

Bug report or feature request · History of changes · Configuration (help, template) · Wikis · Languages · Users · Screenshots

This page provides a few answers for frequently asked questions about WPCleaner.

Using WPCleaner with 2-factor authentication

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If you have activated two-factor authentication on your Wikipedia account, you need to create a bot password for WPCleaner, cf. this guide.

What's the meaning of "b" inside the version number

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The comment used when a modification is done with WPCleaner starts with a link to WPCleaner with also the version number (for example: "WPCleaner v1.34 -" ). When WPCleaner is used in bot mode, a "b" is added after the version number (for example : "WPCleaner v1.34b - ...").

Copy/paste with macOS

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With macOS, if the usual copy/paste commands (Command+C (⌘+C) and Command+V (⌘+V)) are not working with WPCleaner, you can try using the alternate commands (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V). The same is true with other commands that use the command (⌘) key.

Unicode control characters

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WPCleaner often makes modifications for which the edit summary is "WP:WCW project (Unicode control characters)".

Such modifications are due to the removal of control characters in the articles. Control characters are Unicode characters — such as 0x200B (Zero-width space), 0x200E (Left-to-right mark), 0x2028 (Line separator), 0x202A (Left-to-right embedding), 0x202C and 0xFEFF (Byte order mark) — which are usually invisible (hence the feeling that there has been no modifcation, even if the number of bytes in the article has decreased).

Such characters are used in some situations for formatting, but are usually unnecessary. It seems that list of pages generated by MediaWiki have such characters, which would explain why they're often found at the end of category names which have been added by a copy/paste of the category name.