Reviews for Wikiwand - knowledge, with context
Wikiwand - knowledge, with context by Wikiwand
122 reviews
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 17046154, 10 days agoUsed to be a solid add-on, but now pesters the user to login for "AI tools" every time a Wikipedia link is visited, causing unnecessary bloat and wasting the user's time. Why they absolutely ruined a good add-on is beyond me.
- Rated 1 out of 5by StephenM, 24 days agoIf I want AI, I'll either build my own local solution with whatever LLM I want for free or go to a website or use a separate app. Wikiwands' entire existence for being is to make the Wikipedia layout easier to read. Nothing else. Don't remake it ever. AI Wand, NOT Wikiwand. Utter JUNK made by JUNK developers, supported by JUNK people.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Celena, a month agoThis used to be a good extension, which I used for many years across different browsers and devices. Today I've had enough and I'm going to uninstall it.
Before they started remaking it, it was very good. It was essentially a better layout for Wikipedia with not much else to it, but that's why I liked it. It made it clearer to read, easier to use, and just overall felt like a more updated version of Wikipedia's UI. Combined with an ad blocker, it was perfect. However, since the remake, it is worthless. It is so bloated. The majority of the page is taken up with AI stuff, and it wants you to use it constantly. It has made the layout even more confusing - while before I felt like it was very intuitive and more Wikipedia like, now it's just added so much more junk and confusing elements. Wikipedia is way easier to use.
With this latest update, I'm done. I was already getting frustrated with the way pictures were handled. If you clicked on it, there would be various bits of information that covered over part of the picture. Then there was so much blackspace that it wasn't always that much more visible than in the article. You zoom in and it's barely better. Now, I tried to look at the picture it used for the cover image, which no longer shows up in the sidebar as well. I clicked on it, and it was much the same as it used to be, although the information/other pictures below now fades away. Good! However I tried zooming in, because it was still not a big picture. It not only barely zoomed in, but moved the maybe two pixels bigger image around with my cursor. So now I had a very vaguely enlarged picture of some people that bounced around as I tried to exit out of it. Cool!!!!!! Good thing I never use Wikipedia to look at things like art as someone who enjoys art history!!!
The AI is too much, the paywall is too much, the needing to have a separate account for it is too much. And now they have continued to just make the UI worse and worse. I'm done here. I'm so sad that this has gone this way. I'm so disappointed. They had something good and it's useless now. I'd rather use normal Wikipedia, and that's the first time I've said that in many years. - Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 17490856, 2 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 17143382, 2 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by DS, 2 months agoLove 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.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 17984040, 2 months agoShoves 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
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 14774990, 2 months agoGreat design, but ruined by first having AI shoved in my face and now ads everywhere. Back to classic Wikipedia.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Steedlan, 2 months agoWas 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 - Rated 1 out of 5by Mlse, 2 months agoused 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.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18160256, 2 months agoWas 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. - Rated 1 out of 5by Kioraga, 2 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Aphotic, 2 months agonow its filled with ads, 1 star.
alternative addon:
Modern for Wikipedia
by Modern Redesigns - Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18749240, 3 months agoWikiwand 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. - Rated 1 out of 5by Mikaïl, 3 months agoThe AI features are useless, used it once and didn't even answer my question, might as well use ChatGPT for AI
- Rated 1 out of 5by Richard Yan, 3 months agoUsed 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.
- Rated 1 out of 5by linuxenjoyer, 3 months agoIt 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.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Nick, 3 months agoI'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.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18744013, 3 months agoI'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.
- Rated 1 out of 5by AP6YC, 3 months agoWikiwand 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.