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've used this extension for quite some time and it used to work flawlessly. As of recent updates Wikiwand started to inject advertisements into Wikipedia pages even though Wikipedia, by principles, is free from ads. It's absolutely unacceptable.

Now with ads

Wikiwand is absolute trash now. Nonsense AI tools are pushed nonstop, and ads are inserted in so many places in the page. What a waste of what was once a great tool. Go somewhere else to format Wiki pages.

Now have ADs

Started as a fantastic skin/custom CSS for wikipedia. Now turned into some sort of weird corporate product pushing AI summaries and an ungodly amount of ads! Ads on wikipedia??? Have you gone insane?

Does not enhance the user experience of Wikipedia at all. Instead, it changes the look slightly and then bombards you with pop-ups trying to get you to buy their AI service whenever you try to read an article.

It used to be very good. I am sorry to say but the actual Wikipedia website offers a cleaner, and better experience than this riddled with unnecessary feature(s) add-on.

Switched to another extension after all these AI features rolled out. Just wanted to change the look of articles, but now I can't even do that because its bundled with the paid AI features. If you're looking for a modern and sleek way to make Wikipedia look nice, either get Dark Reader, which lets you keep the default design but make it dark mode, or Modern for Wikipedia, which makes it look nicer, lets you change between shades from white to black and a light brown, and lastly lets you adjust stuff with the text.

I was not sponsored to say this, by the way, this is just my own opinion. I love the style of Wikiwand, but the AI features being forced on causing other design features to be behind a paywall caused me to list alternatives for people reading this.