Classic mode for Wikipedia

a Firefox add-on to get the classic Wikipedia interface and layout back.

Classic mode for Wikipedia

Classic mode for Wikipedia is a Firefox add-on to get the classic Wikipedia interface and layout back, pre-January 2023. It is free, open-source, without advertisement, and respects your privacy -and it will stay this way.

The add-on also works with other Wikimedia projects: Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikidata.org, and MediaWiki (more will come). It leaves Nostalgia Wikipedia untouched. The add-on can be installed from here.

Feel free to write a review on the Mozilla add-on page if you find it useful or, God forbid, if you encountered problems using it.

Overview

Technical details

The extension automatically appends a useskin=vector parameter to any Wikipedia page URL you request, and automatically loads this new URL.

For example, if you request https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_regression, you’ll automatically land on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_regression?useskin=vector, which will show you the page with the classic Wikipedia interface (a.k.a. the “legacy Vector skin”, in Wikipedia jargon).

The only exceptions to that are Nostalgia Wikipedia, or if you explicitly request another layout by changing the value in useskin=<value>, or if you request explicitly to see the mobile version of a page (e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_regression).

For more details on how the add-on works, you can simply check the source code which is publicly available. Alternatively, you can ask for additional information here or by writing an e-mail to classic.mode.wikipedia /at/ gmail.com.

Privacy

You don’t need to have a Wikipedia account to use this add-on. The add-on does not retrieve any information about you and never will. It just automatically redirects you to the classic version of Wikipedia pages with as little friction as possible. Nothing more, nothing less.

Compatibility

This add-on is compatible with Firefox versions > 52.0.

Roadmap

I will investigate reported bugs and fix them if possible. Pull requests are more than welcome relatively to that.

More features may come progressively, depending on user requests.

License

The code is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 .

The extension icon is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. This icon is a derivate work from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ic_settings_backup_restore_48px.svg (author: Google Inc.).

Alternatives

Here are two excellent alternative add-ons that do more or less the same thing than Classic mode for Wikipedia, if you want to see if the grass is greener on the other side:

  • For Firefox users, Wikipedia Vector Skin. This one has been developed pretty much at the same time than Classic mode for Wikipedia and offers similar features. It ended up being more popular for some reason (that is, the developer is probably a more frequent user of social media than I am). Neat code, and the developer seems to answer quickly to bug reports, so I can only recommend it warmly. Nice job!
  • For Chrome users, Old Wiki is a very nice extension and works well as far as I’ve tested it (source code here). Nice and clean code, and the developer seems to answer quickly to bug reports/feature requests.

Author info

This add-on is a personal initiative, developed during my free time. I am not affiliated in any way to the Wikimedia Foundation, even though I am a sporadic anonymous contributor to Wikipedia.

I also have a couple of other free and open-source projects hosted on Github, that you can find here. They are generally unrelated to Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects, and are more on the side of research and publishing. But who knows, you might be interested!