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How to add a comic to a category?

I don't know how to add a comic to a catergory, how do I do this? Qwertyuiopfromdefly (talk) 03:19, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

If you edit a page and scroll down to the bottom, you may see how it is in the existing categories it is in. That does not apply to things that get added due to templates (e.g. the current latest comic has: Comics from 2026, Comics from January, Friday comics, Incomplete explanations, Incomplete transcripts), but many(/most?) comics have directly added ones (for the same example, currently: Comics featuring Cueball, Comics featuring Ponytail, Physics, Chemistry).

Just copy the format for one of those (latter), from either the current comic or another (if the one you're intending has nothing in already). Or copy the exact Category tag from another comic already with that tag (easily found through the given Category index).

It doesn't really matter where you put the Category tag, in the page, but it is considered best practice to put it at the bottom, below the "Discussion insertion" 'code'. Hint: if you edit the Transcript section, or instead the Trivia/last non-Discussion subsection, that makes for less scrolling down to find that, even on long Explanation pages... ;)

BTW, you can practically add any category name you like, but I'd suggest not making a new one up (to become red-text category link, until created). If you think there's a need for a new category, suggest it (in the Discussion for the page you started thinking of it in, at a bare minimum, and mention/link all the other candidates you'll have in mind), and let there be a discussion. That lets other voices address possible issues of format/wording (like "Comics featuring Cueball" is how we do that kind of thing, not "Comics with Cueball in") or even spelling. Or if you had an idea for a "Paperclips" category, thinking of two suitably 'linked' comics (...I'm talking hypothetical, here!), but someone else can point out that "Office Supplies" (I'd say "Stationary", but that'snprobably not as common a US term) will cover the countless comics with rubber bands, drawing pins, etc (US: elastic bands/pushpins, yes?) and be even more useful. At least until there's enough paperclip/etc parodies to make a new sub-/super-category relationships between Paperclip and Office Supplies.

But don't worry too much about that, this is where the initial discussion with people who've seen it before, here and elsewhere, may be useful, It saves anyone having to add an unwise new category to the "to be deleted" category.

It's also why I didn't just say "type [[this]]" as a direct answer. If you look at what's done, and understand the principles, it's better than just being handheld through it then having to guess what to do when something different is needed. (Also learning oddities, like linking pages to categories without adding them to it, or non-default orderings on the Category index.)

Hope that helps. Although there are probably more than enough "just do this, this and this" wiki-tutorials out there, as well. Maybe not exactly tuned to the this site's practices, but they might give you useful information that I've forgotten to. 82.132.236.44 13:02, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

thank you!!! Qwertyuiopfromdefly (talk) 04:21, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata

Wikidata has items for pretty much every strip of xkcd, so I have a couple of things to say. Firstly, it might be helpful to have each explanation include a link to the corresponding Wikidata item. Secondly, if anyone wants to help flesh out the Wikidata items, for example by adding links to this site, that would be really helpful. In particular, 2193 and on need a fair bit of work, adding titles, links to explainxkcd, and so on. lp0 on fire () 16:36, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

So, there's Wikidata pages that link to the comics. And you're suggesting that our pages (that link to the comics) should link to the Wikidata pages that link to the comics? And that the we take information already on here and put them on there?

That's how I read it, but something tells me that I've not understood it all correctly. (Or even most?) 81.179.199.253 20:54, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that's about right (the Wikidata pages also link to explainxkcd). Wikidata is a database that stores structured information, rather than prose like we have here, and copying some information there can help with making the information more widely accessible. lp0 on fire () 10:55, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

In terms of Wikidata and other WMF projects, it is generally frowned-upon to try and use "off-wiki" spaces to coordinate "on-wiki" activity. (This forum would be considered "off-wiki" from that perspective.) This may be considered "meat puppetry" and grounds for blocks or bans.

However, it seems that any systematic linking from explainxkcd into Wikidata would be a great idea. There should be a template and a field for it so that we can treat each comic equally, because it would mean adding a lot of links, and linking nearly every single comic to be released in the future. Elizium23 (talk) 20:52, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

I suggest a trivial insert into Template:comic the option of a "wikidata=" field, to give a suitable onward hyperlink, if and only if given. (Although, to be fancy, one could even make the null/blank case of the input create somethng like a "[[Category:Comic lacks wikidata information]]" membership.) Then let people add this as and when (and perhaps get theusaf to change theusafBOT to prefill it as a blank). Or, in all likelihood, someone will go on a binge to do as many of them as they find time.

But I'd give the regulars (Kynde, Favifake, etc) an opportunity to discuss the details first, before actually messing with that. Or indeed creating a brand new template, as the alternate standalone method. Just to make sure it's not treading on any other toes. 81.179.199.253 21:30, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm not too understanding about why to link Wikidata onto this wiki. It says on the Wikidata Introduction page that it is

"a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary knowledge base, collecting structured data to provide support for [...] the other wikis of the Wikimedia movement"

and so on. Unless we need this data for botting purposes, I don't really see how it would be helpful. 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 01:30, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand the purpose of adding this? Why would a reader want to open the Wikidata item for a comic, what can they find on Wikidata that they can't find here? FaviFake (talk) 07:52, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Structured data can be fantastically useful. Although, like so many things in the world, it's primarily useful to those who find it useful. To those who don't find it useful, it can seem quite useless indeed.

It would make a certain amount of sense to include a link to the Wikidata entity from each of our explanation pages. This would be roughly analogous to the "Wikidata item" link you can see on every Wikipedia page. It would be the inverse to the "explain xkcd ID" link you can find on the Wikidata page for every xkcd comic. But I'm not sure where the link would actually go on one of our comic explanation pages. One possibility would be the infobox — except that we don't have infoboxes. Another possibility would be the left sidebar, except that I don't know how to go about actually putting it there, or coding it for each page.

At any rate (in part because I'm one of the weirdos who does find structured data useful), I've written some scripts to update the Wikidata entities as each new comic comes up, and I expect to keep doing this, barring any unforeseen hindrances. At the moment it's complete through Q139738162 for 3241 Horizontal Stabilizers. I've necessarily got my own cross-reference file from xkcd comic numbers to Wikidata entities identifiers ("Q numbers") which I can share with anyone who's interested. If anyone wants to take a stab at figuring out where Wikidata links go on our comic explanation pages, I'll be happy to participate. —Scs (talk) 02:27, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Also, because it doesn't hurt, I've added the hypothetical wikidata= parameter to the {{comic}} template invocation for ten recent comics, from 3232 to 3241. For now, this is not only innocuous but invisible, as the template doesn't yet use the new parameter, so nothing relating to it shows up on the page as displayed. But if someone wants to experiment with a modification to the template to make it display a Wikidata link in some way, this is a starting point. —Scs (talk) 10:31, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Suggestions for Randall

Below are some things that I feel can be improved on the xkcd website These things would improve it (at least for me) greatly, and would also make a lot of sense to add just because

1.Links to the other xkcd websites 2.Favorited or saved comics 3.A little text bar where you can type in the number of a comic and it'll show it 4.At the top of the website, there is a little box with the title and a sign showing when it updates. There's a lot of white space there. It doesn't really need to get fixed, but I just think it looks weird 5.Individual comic explanations (or a link to the explainxkcd page of that comic) 6.On the 'push notifications' one, there is a way you can install xkcd as an app into your computer. It would be nice if you could download it from anywhere on the website

These are just suggestions, and I recognize that they would be hard to do. But it would be super cool if they were added. -- Haddoniscool (talk) 23:49, 24 February 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Unfortunately, we cannot make Randall do anything. He might read this message, but there is no guarantee. You could reach out to him at [email protected], email the website's sysop at [email protected], or ask User:FaviFake to email him for you, as he got Randall's personal email address. Hope this helps! tori :3^{talk to me!} 00:29, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

To be clear, I got Randall's email address from an old wayback machine link; I just didn't want to post it so publicly because he likely removed it for a reason. You can also find it on reddit by searching it on google :) FaviFake (talk) 10:34, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

My own replies to this:

1. There have been links to the officially sanctioned fora/forums (until after they got broken), shop, etc, on xkcd.com, and currently the mass of links is the "Archive / What If? / About / Feed•Email / TW•FB•IG / -Books- / What If? 2 / WI?•TE•HT" text, which seems to already be what you're asking for,
2. A lot of work to get right... it'd require something akin to a login (which doesn't exist, currently), or at least a pseudo-login via a cookie-drop you have to configure, for something that you can do at least as well through your own browser's Bookmarksz
3. ...like the address bar of your browser sort of works? (Just do "xkcd.com/whatever number" in that, or edit/add the number, as you're already on that site.) I think I must not understand your request, though.
4. Sometimes it has more things in it, right now it doesn't.
5. Randall doesn't 'explain' his comics (usually!) he just puts them out there and we then try to work out what the (sometimes non-obvious) reasons are behind various bits in them. But, to follow up with the browser address-bar trick, when on a comic (say "xkcd.com/4321", except for a number that e ists), try putting "exp" in front of that (i.e. "expxkcd.com/4321")... Someone set that up to get you to the relevent page here in as simple a way (3rd-party, because we're not part of Randall's official domain) as possible. Going to "expxkcd.com" without a number (e.g. modifying the official "latest comic" page of just "xkcd.com") brings you to the latest explainxkcd.com comic page, too.
6. That was a 'special' comic thing... I'm half surprised he left it all working (without, as you suggest, adding a perpetual link to the "any old comic" page-surround) rather than prune it back once it wasn't the current easteregg that it originally was...

But, as basically already said, none of us here (that any of us admit to) are either collaborating directly with Randall or Randall himself. We're 'just' a hobbyist-community of (somewhat) like-minded fans of his work, and very little chance that any suggestions here will get implemented. (On how to change xkcd.com, at least. You might get lucky if you have an explainxkcd.com change that you want to suggest. Unless it's "upgrade it to the latest mediawiki version", or similar... ;) ) 82.132.238.95 03:26, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Confusing matrices transcript

some of the comics in category confusing matrcies have tables as the transcript, which is i think not good accoridng to faq, I am going to mark incomplete now ^April_fools^update!(talk) 09:24, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

anyone notice how the "random explanation" button seems to be biased towards recent comics?

I most frequently get comics from 2025 and 2026, and barely anything from before that SevenTheGamingKitty (talk) 22:04, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

It has been noticed... Without any obvious solution while still trying to do the "random comic(-like) page, not just random 'any page'" functionality., unfortunately. 81.179.199.253 22:11, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

comic 3268 is mysteriously missing

anyone notice that 3268 (offside) just has no page at all? not even any logs suggesting it once did exist? SevenTheGamingKitty (talk) 01:05, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Yes: the site is in the process of dying. I'm surprised you were able to post; I'll be surprised if I can post. -- 74.104.147.14 01:14, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

For several days, something was actively broken meaning no posts were possible, including by the "comic uploading BOT". That something has been fixed, but only after another comic came out, so the page-uploading BOT was now uploading that (as soon as it could do anything). Probably never equipped to hold multiple "still to be uploaded" pages in its try-and-try-again buffer. And, honestly, it should be a rare occasion that this is necessary (not just to be noted and manually rectified), and not the least of our problems.

As for the site being 'in the process of dying', I hypothesise slightly differently...

Firstly, the general unavailability is due to too much data-scraping, or perhaps (failed!) spamming, overloading the server (it has happened before, sometimes Cloudflare has been able to help there). I note that on the reddit site (and elsewhere), multiple people have gleefully announced that they've taken copies of the whole site (albeit after the next problem), but I imagine that's just the tip of the iceberg. Especially with every AI firm out there likely scraping as much corpus of open data for their pet projects (or even Agentic AIs doing it for themselves/their 'clients'). This is likely to be a big problem that is going to hit any site. And I've seen several other places having to implement buffer services to weed out excessive spikes in ('lurker-only') use that were overloading their servers.

(Noting that mirror-sites (or successor-sites) of here will hav the same issues to contend with. They may have the advantage of an active server-proprietor who can react to this and do as the forums/etc that I mentioned above did, adding necessary safeguards, or course, but still not 'trivial'.)

Secondly, in the light of the overload (or, as a distant possibility but one that isn't too distant, one cause of the final stretch of overload being a 'well meaning' person trying to brute-force enough access to... say ...upgrade this site's MediaWiki version, which they managed to mess up) one of the vital site cache-files got 'bricked' through over-(/mis-)use, effectively closing the door to all further edits. At least until the mostly-absejt superuser returned to correct that with the necessary low-level (i.e. deep within the server) and high-level (i.e. via root or root-equivalent access) login required to do that properly.

As it stands, I had feared that it was curtains for this site (at least for updating purposes), yet it isn't. Not yet, albeit after a small break in service. It's still possibly threatened, but not for any particular additional reasons that aren't just as applicable to any other 'hobby' site. And even a fair few more professional ones, to be honest, in this changing world. (What are we up to now...? "Web 4.0"? Well, in my mind we are, I was around for "Web 1.0", effectively, saw the (actually refered to as) Web 2.0 arrive, since then the Social Media explosion is probably version 3.0 by the same shift of paradigm, and this phase of AI/etc surely brings us up to 4.0, by my personal count. I wonder what my nominal 5.0 kight turn out to be..? ;) )

But, at least for the moment, it's back. I've lurked on a couple of the mirrors, that I know of ("hello mirror", if this gets mirrored there!) and may contribute there if trhe merge/migration becomes official.

Until then, I'll try not to fork things too much, though doubtless there'll be discrepancies between the original and successor instance of this site, that need manually sorting out. 82.132.236.148 09:02, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

I encourage everyone join the Discord server if you're interested in seeing how the site is being recovered: https://discord.gg/wFqRJbJGc9. Celene is currently waiting for Jeff to reply to them so they can merge explainingxkcd.com back into explainxkcd.com. FaviFake (talk) 09:21, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

An apology

Hello. I am the vandal who ran the "crap" spambot attacks (explain xkcd:Crap) back in 2022. I would like to apologize to the explain xkcd community for the pointless and stupid disruption that I caused.

I didn't really have any particular motive, other than an immature, stupid sense of humor. Once again, I apologize for running these attacks, and for the harm and frustration that they caused. Former Crap Vandal (talk) 03:12, 18 July 2026 (UTC)