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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1430 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 1, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What's with Wikipedia's new (2022) appearance, and its refusal to remember my preferences?

I've told it half a dozen times that I like wide column size and small text...and it keeps on reverting to the "modern" crap that doesn't even show half as much information on the screen.

I'm tempted to do the same thing I did to Fandom.com in order to make it a persistently readable website, but I'm hoping there's an easier way.

(No, I won't reward their arbitrary restrictions and poor UI by making an account. That way lies madness.)

I suspect it might have something to do with privacy settings. Wikipedia probably uses pretty short-lived cookies to store your preferences if you don't have an account. I think the cookie lifetime is 1 week. And traditionally Wikipedia is very reluctant to track people that don't have accounts so once the cookie is gone, the info is lost.

That sounds reasonable, but I'd be disappointed if you were right.

They decided that possibly tracking "a person who likes certain visual settings" was too invasive...so they're pushing users towards actually tracking them as a specific individual.

It's not about settings per se, it's just if you don't have an account, there's nothing on the system that is persistent that can store this information. What you probably could do relatively easily is to edit the cookie on your browser and extend its lifetime, so that it wouldn't be automatically deleted.

If you won't make an account then it will be hard for a website to remember your preferences across different devices or cookies etc. I imagine your only option is to use an add on for example:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/legacy-wikipedia/

I'm on one device, and don't clear my cookies. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia is the only website that consistently forgets my preferences (regardless of whether I log in or not).

Thanks for the addon recommendation, I'll check it out.

I wonder if modern dynamic IPs work this way for Wikipedia (but not other websites) because Wikipedia logs your IP specifically for edit-tracking purposes. Creating specific demi-profiles for each of them behind the scenes. I don't know anything about networking this is just speculation.

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