Darkness reigns over Wikipedia as official dark mode comes to pass

Do not start a headline with "Darkness reigns over Wikipedia"!!!

What's wrong with Darkness?
- Wikipedia is about to become a really weird place...

At last, I won’t get blinded whenever I open Wikipedia

These are dark times

Indeed.
- No, thats the job hunting website. Wikipedia is the one anyone can edit historical facts.

The year is 2024, hacker news stands strong as only remaining website to not offer darkmode.

Thou art forbidden to peruse our content in the dead of night; verily, our content is for the light of day alone.

- Get on my level.
- "Getting paid is weird and sometimes hard" Wtf...
Have you heard of lightbulbs?
Gotta get Hack, its an HN client/front-end. Beautiful and has all that stuff, otherwise the website is very non-addicting to me, I'll give them that.
- Thanks, I ended up getting harmonic. Seems to do the job. It's baffling that hacker news is like that

Wikipedia is such a beauty and I'm so glad and grateful it exists. Surely it's not perfect, but it's so inspiring and hopeful to see a collective effort be so successful. I sometimes wonder, what new projects we've seen since that are equally inspiring. The Fediverse certainly is beautiful but it's also still a little bit fringe. I personally really like MusicBrainz, but that started 24 years ago What new collective projects has the internet brought us in recent years? And what collective projects could the future bring us?

my favorite thing about wikipedia is the information density, there are few things that match it, except for books, and those often cost money.

If you are on desktop and you aren't sure how it works, try out this Wiki page and in the top right corner you can see an "eyeglasses" looking icon. Click that and set it to Automatic or Dark.

Very happy to see it come to wikipedia!!

But I think it also needs some polish. The contrast is too high and the blue on black of the hyperlinks is too garish for sure.

Hello DarkReader my old friend...

~~Which you still need for mobile~~. Edit: Nope.

Nope, its available on mobile too. Just go to
Sidebar>Settings>Colour
(Options to choose from)
Light
Dark
Automatic
- Oh look at that. It was hiding from me.
- Yeah but that requires cookies. Not everybody allows them. I block everything that isn't a first party cookie, and set them to delete every time I close my browser.
The Wikipedia app has had dark mode for a while. Plus dark mode in Firefox works fine with no extensions.
Dark Reader on Firefox mobile works well for me!
pretty sure mobile darkmode for wikipedia has been avaliable for a while now

The Washington Post: "Democracy dies in darkness"

Wikipedia: "Knowledge that is shared in torchlight is fucking awesome"

Democracy dies in darkness
From what I've seen, it dies in plain sight to standing ovations
- And memes, lots of memes.

I thought this was gonna be about Wikipedia finally shutting down because nobody donates

They are actually getting too many donations, many times more than they need to run wikipedia. There was and is a big conflict about the unsustainable growth of donations to the foundation and its questionable use of those funds.
- Wikimedia Foundation (the org behind the Wikipedia and similar projects) does get more donations than their operational cost, but that's expected. The idea is that they'll invest the extra fund^1 and some day the return alone will be able to sustain Wikipedia forever.
  Although, some have criticized that the actual situation is not clearly conveyed in their asking for donation message. It gives people an impression that Wikipedia is going under if you don't donate.
  Others also criticized that the feature development is slow compared to the funding, or that not enough portion is allocated to the feature development. See how many years it takes to get dark mode! I don't know how it's decided or what's their target, so I can't really comment on this.
  They publish their annual financial auditions^2 and you can have a read if you're interested. There are some interesting things. For example, in 2022-2023, processing donations actually costs twice as much as internet hosting, which one would expect to be the major expense.
- Similar to Mozilla (but not from donations but instead of its millions paid to it by Google)
- Huh, now that is a truly interesting bit of information.
- they're a non profit, so their either banking money in a proverbial "war chest" or they're just nabbing donations to be used in the future, for large expansions or what not.
  It's an interesting problem to have, being a non profit entity.
- Remember, if you donate to the WMF, they will use that money to enforce "WMF global bans" against users trying to make useful contributions but who once looked at the wrong people funny.

Finally I don’t need to have an account just to have dark mode

People were making accounts?!
Ive been using browser extensions.
- It was an experimental gadget setting under your profile.
  I've been using userstyles, but nothing seems to have worked as well as the built in feature for me.

Finally the l33t hax0rz from Anonymous can browse Wikipedia in peace

finnaly I'll use wikipedia on my laptop more

Dark mode, night mode, light-on-dark design, or whatever you want to call the version of computer content that doesn't feel blindingly bright at night...

Don't wanna be that guy, but these template news-article openings always make my brain hurt. Come on, as if everyone has ever called it anything else than "Dark mode".

I can’t be the only one who doesn’t see well with dark mode.

You're not, but having both is awesoooooome!

All jokes aside, I might imagine it wasn't all easy to do it correctly. Great job!

democracy dies in dark mode

Isn't this like one of the signs of the end times?

Or the start of a new age of enlightment and the spread of ideas online with ease.
- Perhaps it was only a sign of the end (of the bad) times after all

It doesn't seem to work on the German Wikipedia. Super weird decision to tie display settings to a language.

It does not work with spanish either
Edit: moreover, if you configure it by accessing an english article and then switch languages, darkess mode goes off
- IIRC the wikipedia for each language is pseudo independent. This feature will eventually make it to all, I hope.

A long time coming, but because of their recent changes in the past couple of months if I have JS disabled on Wikipedia I either have an obnoxiously large blank margin on the right, or I get pop-up annoyed by this dark mode announcement with JS enabled and private tab browsing.

Yeah, I noticed that the JavaScript bloat is slowly taking over Wikipedia.
- yeah, cant say im huge fan of the new margins, it's starting to look more and more like every article tabloid site ever.

LOL took 'em long enough.

2 down, 14 more to go. Nice.

Right? We are going to do all of the basic 16 terminal colors, right?

Powers of 2 are very powerful. They can certainly build elaborate and understandable stories.
Powers of 3 are far more cohesive, though.

Such innovation

"One who knows nothing can understand nothing"

–Riku who is Ansem who is not Ansem who is Xehanort

Praise Cthulhu!

Did someone use digital blotting paper on the Moon article?

Wikipedia has needed a plugin to be usable for a very long time. That Plugin gives you dark mode, on top of a bunch of other necessary features.

Your definition of necessary and what most people consider the word necessary to mean seem to contradict each other. Here you seem to mean it as 'nice to have' whereas the actual definition is 'required to be done, achieved or present; needed; essential'
:p

Wiki "Darkmode" which can seeming be bought by anyone with money, to remove content makes WIKI a total lie.

They do not deserve or will earn our money. They are scammers and cheaters.

HACK THE PLANET - FUCK THE LIARS.

I’m confused about what you’re referring to. I’m reading this as people being able to pay for dark mode which somehow allows them to remove content? Maybe this is because I just woke up but I’m curious what you mean.
- Long awake, didn't get a thing