Wikipedia (Wikipedia.com) is one of the most often visited websites on the internet. Virtually any topic you want to research, any well-known person, almost any city – it’s hard to imagine anyone or anything of importance not having a Wikipedia page. However, Wikipedia was launched back in 2001 – and the layout and design of the website seems to have not changed since that date.

It’s usually pretty easy to spot a website that has not been updated in a long time. In some cases, a business might have paid someone to create their website a long time ago, and now they lost contact with that person and they have no idea how to change the site or update it. Or, the website owner might just be unaware that the site looks very dated. But to most people it’s obvious.

One of the very popular sites that is extremely outdated is Craigslist. The owner of that site, Craig Newmark, doesn’t care about how it looks, and he has said so. Craigslist was started back in 1995 – can you believe it’s been 20 years? – and the site design is still virtually the same as it was then.

That’s the situation with Wikipedia. Even though Wikipedia gets millions of website visitors, the owner, Jimmy Wales, has never seen the need to update the site design to make it look nicer and more modern. It’s still the same boring layout that it’s had for the last 14 years.

But it doesn’t have to be that way on YOUR computer.

Thanks to a wonderful browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, Wikipedia can have a great new design that’s much more pleasing to the eye. The extension is called Wikiwand, and you can get it at www.Wikiwand.com. It’s free of course.

To show you how it makes a difference with the way Wikipedia pages are displayed, I took some before-Wikiwand and after-Wikiwand screenshots.

Here’s what the Wikipedia page for the Milky Way looks like usually:

Pretty bland, right? Here’s what it looks like after the Wikiwand is applied:

Having the large image across the top of the article really makes a big difference in presentation. But also, the content itself is just easier to read. It’s actually the same words on the page, but the font size is larger and clearer in the Wikiwand version.

How about this one – the Mt Everest page, before Wikiwand:

And after Wikiwand:

To get Wikiwand working in your browser, just go to Wikiwand.com and click the button to install it:

You will not see that installation button if you’re using Internet Explorer, though – it doesn’t work with that web browser. Reason #842 to quit using Internet Explorer.

And you should also know this – even after you have Wikiwand installed, if for some reason you want to go back and just see the old boring version of Wikipedia, you can. At the bottom right corner of every Wikipedia page there’s a big W, and when you mouse over it, you’ll see a slide switch to enable or disable Wikiwand: