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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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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.

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