Ugly headers in Wikipedia
Problem
On January 18, 2023, I started having problems with imports from Wikipedia. Many articles have a long list of languages at the top. I can only see the title and need to scroll down a page or two to start reading. Can I fix it?
Answer
This is probably a side effect of the change of article format at Wikipedia. Sometimes, users complain about changes, and they are reverted. However, this one is likely to bother only users of SuperMemo.
Workarounds
Set Vector legacy (2010) as your preferred Wikipedia skin
Assuming you have a Wikipedia account, you can select the radio button "Vector legacy (2010)" at your Skin Preferences page.
Delete headers in SuperMemo
You can also try one of these workarounds in SuperMemo:
- scroll down to the beginning of the text you want to read, and press Alt+\ (this will delete the unwanted text at the top)
- scroll down to the beginning of the text you want to read, and choose Delete before cursor from Commander
- split the article (e.g. Split : Split the article in the Commander), and delete the top element (check if some texts at the bottom are not needed)
Append ?action=render to the article's URL
Append ?action=render to every article's URL you want to import (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization?action=render) and only then import to SuperMemo. action=render outputs the HTML rendering of the entire page content but only the unstyled article text is produced, not any part of the user interface (additional toolboxes, search box, stylesheets, etc.).
Future
This is probably an easy fix, and a bothersome problem, therefore it will be fixed in SuperMemo 19. It is less likely to be fixed in SuperMemo 18 as the code is only enhanced with serious bug fixes from SuperMemo 19. Code for earlier versions of SuperMemo is frozen due to the changes in the Delphi compiler. Fixes are too risky and likely only for most catastrophic bugs. See: Workarounds for good solutions.