When I open a wikipedia article, 70% of the screen is covered by either AI bullshit, or a huge window with new settings, 90% of which are behind a paywall.

Love how Wikiwand used to be an incredibly useful product that made Wikipedia more readable and now it's... "AI-driven" slop garbage that no one wants or asked for. Yet another product "improving" itself right out of usefulness. What a waste.

Shoves GenAI garbage down your throat and the pop ups blocks half the screen. Also sells your data. Just go use something like Modern for Wikipedia

Great design, but ruined by first having AI shoved in my face and now ads everywhere. Back to classic Wikipedia.

Was great, but the recent changes made the UI awful and turn this add-on into a whole cash cow that is against the principles of Wikipedia

- Too much ads, trying to hide bring to a paywall, adding CSS doesn't worth 5$. Even with an adblock the banner background stays.
- They added an AI that is completely useless and only here to surf on the trend of AIs.
- Talking about ads it requires a Wikimand account despite that Wikipedia already have one

We can't accept an add-on that makes money off Wikipedia

used to be good, then over the years it became incrementally more annoying to use. first all this AI/ account stuff (which was tolerable but annoyinh), paywalls and now ads everywhere. its just not worth it for that marginal improvement over stock wiki.

Was once good, now it is terrible and full of ads.
The ads can be blocked with an ad-blocker but it will leave placeholder boxes. If you're using ublock Origin, you can remove them with the "block Element function" though you will need to tune it to remove them entirely.

Target the 'remove ads' part, and tune the left slider once to the left. Preview shows the results in real-time.

Awesome extension until they decided to add Ads.

now its filled with ads, 1 star.
alternative addon:
Modern for Wikipedia
by Modern Redesigns

the enshittification has started

Wikiwand used to be great. It was a bit annoying when the AI features were shoved in my face, but it was at least tolerable. However, ads have been added recently, and even if I use an ad blocker there are still placeholders breaking the page layout.

RIP Wikiwand.

The AI features are useless, used it once and didn't even answer my question, might as well use ChatGPT for AI

Too much ads and AI-slop

So, I wrote a negative review yesterday (which I've now deleted), but it appears that the Wikiwand add-on was updated yesterday and it's now working again. Yay! The AI Tools block on the right can be minimised and an ad blocker takes care of ads, but I may just upgrade to a paid version anyway since I use Wikipedia a lot and WIkiwand (pro) is very reasonably priced and supports the existing and ongoing development efforts of a great add-on. FWIW, I think it's worth it to get a much better reading experience than ordinary Wikipedia for frequent users.

Used to be great with beautiful styles. When the AI stuff rolled out, I felt like it was bad taste but stuck with it. Then came the ads, on top of hard work by volunteers editing wikipedia. I guess we do live in a capitalist society with insatiable corporate greed, but the least I could do is to stop using this expired plugin. Oh and also, no, some lines of CSS is not worth $5 a month.

Ad filled garbagefest.

Putting ads and AI-slop on a free to use webpage is peak greed, well done. You are a shadow of your former self.

It was good for a while but they added AI stuff nobody asked for and you now have to be logged into their system for data collection if you don't want to get served ads.

I'll stick with Wiki's default look if it means no ads, no random AI stuff, etc. Have been a user for some time, but I guess all good things must come to an end.