How did Wikipedia layout become so bloated?

14 points | by countWSS 3 hours ago ago

21 comments

It's especially annoying on pages that have big tables, where all the wasted space makes it need to horizontally scroll. Sometimes I wish that once a horizontal scrollbar appears, browsers would ignore max-width on that page from then on.

Olreich 2 hours ago

Did you disable cookies or something? Table of Contents sidebar hides and stays hidden across page loads, browser restarts, etc. Appearance sidebar is the same. Appearance sidebar lets you set the article width as well, with the default being slightly slim, but the wide option being the full browser width.

The only way I can get it to reset is to clear my cookies, so its likely that.

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countWSS 25 minutes ago

Wikipedia.org :270 cookies, 110MB used. Never cleared or disabled any.

ateles 2 hours ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/legacy-wikipe...

davisr an hour ago

I use Redirector in Firefox to rewrite URLs to the old Wikipedia:

  {
      "description": "Old Wikipedia",
      "exampleUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page",
      "exampleResult": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=vector",
      "error": null,
      "includePattern": "^(https?://)([a-z0-9-]*\\.)wikipedia\\.org\\/wiki\\/([^?]+)(?!=\\?useskin=vector)",
      "excludePattern": "",
      "patternDesc": "Adds ?useskin=vector to any Wikipedia page",
      "redirectUrl": "https://$2wikipedia.org/wiki/$3?useskin=vector",
      "patternType": "R",
      "processMatches": "noProcessing",
      "disabled": false,
      "grouped": false,
      "appliesTo": [
          "main_frame"
      ]
  }

bananaflag 2 hours ago

I have been using MonoBook for years (early 2023 I think), I see nothing like that.

inigyou 2 hours ago

It might have something to do with Wikimedia Foundation and WP:CANCER.

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josefritzishere 2 hours ago

reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

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squigz an hour ago

It seems a bit silly to base this entire analysis on Wikipedia page views without exploring what else the WMF does.

And in any event, I have a really hard time getting worked up about the relatively small amount of money they deal with - and use to do a lot of good for the world - while corruption and greedy corporations are as rampant and filthy rich as they are.

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tosti an hour ago

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Corruption is fought best by not allowing it anywhere at all.

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squigz an hour ago

Putting aside that I don't believe WMF is 'wrong' here at all, it's simply not reasonable or healthy to get upset about every wrong thing. One needs to pick their battles.

tdeck an hour ago

Personally I'm not worked up over it either, but I find the argument that this puts Wikipedia at risk persuasive. If it some point WMF racks up debts they can't pay and puts itself up for sale, these days probably Elon Musk or Larry Ellison would buy it.

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squigz 38 minutes ago

Is the WMF in debt?

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inigyou 36 minutes ago

The WMF is clearly unable to reduce expenses. If donations ever decrease, it will be bankrupt within two years.

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squigz 20 minutes ago

> The WMF is clearly unable to reduce expenses.

Nothing about this is clear. What makes you think that, if the donations were to significantly fall off, they would be unable to reduce expenses?

chuckadams an hour ago

A quick reminder that reader mode works great with almost every WP article.