Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Chapter 20. Customizing with Preferences

What you see in the Wikipedia window in front of you isn’t fixed in concrete. Wikipedia has a surprising number of ways that you can modify its appearance. If you’re a registered editor, you have a My Preferences page, where you can change a number of settings that control how Wikipedia’s pages look on your screen. The link to My Preferences is in your screen’s upper-right corner, when you’re logged in.

The My Preferences page has 11 tabs, as shown in Figure 20-1. This chapter walks you through each of them, showing you what each tab can do for you.

Figure 20-1. The preferences page has 11 tabs. When you click the My Preferences page at the upper right of any Wikipedia page, it opens to the first tab, “User profile”.

User Profile

At the very top of the user profile tab are a number of non-changeable fields: your user name, your user ID, the user groups that you are a member of, the number of edits you’ve done to date, and your global account status (see the box on page 48).

Note

In various nooks and crannies of Wikipedia, you can find a number of edit counters, programs that sort and count your edits (so many to articles, so many to user talk pages, and so on). These edit counters don’t include edits to deleted pages, because they use your User contributions page, which doesn’t list such edits. But the edit count in your ...