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Chinese Wikipedia (维基百科) has the ability to convert its articles from Traditional to Simplified Chinese through a dropdown menu on its top left corner.

This is great because although I can read both languages, I prefer simplified. However, as Wikipedia is more popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong than Mainland China, it defaults to Traditional Chinese. It appears that the preferences are not saved as I move from article to article.

Is there any way to have Chinese Wikipedia always show me the Simplified Chinese version, preferably without having to create an account there?

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  • This is maybe more a question about MediaWiki (the software engine) than Wikipedia itself. It's open-source and you may be better off asking that question in a forum there. Otherwise, there's a page at wikipedia explaining how the auto-conversion works. Maybe ask your question on the talk page? Apologies for this not being a comment. Because of reputation limitations, I'm not able to post a comme – Fuhrmanator Apr 28 '12 at 18:18
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    I'm certain that if you create an account, you can set the preferences for Simplified rather than traditional. – Ellie Kesselman Oct 28 '12 at 13:29
  • If you want, I can also add cookie magic to the script so that it remembers your preference when you log out. – Manishearth Nov 16 '12 at 18:36
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    I have the same problem in reverse. I even created an account and set traditional in my language preferences and I have to manually switch every page to traditional :( – ianpojman Sep 13 '13 at 22:46
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You may want to try out this userscript that I wrote. It makes all of the links on the page link to the simplified chinese version. Basically, the traditional links are under /wiki/, and the simplified Chinese links are under /zh-cn/. Rather simple matter to replace the /wiki/ in each link.

You can download the script by clicking on "raw". See here for instructions on installing userscripts.

Update: I've modified the script so that it only will replace links on pages which are already in Simplified Chinese. This way, you can browse in Traditional normally, or switch to Simplified and browse there normally.

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Nowadays, the language converter in Chinese Wikipedia are able to follow the language preference set by uesrs in browser.

So that, if user configure the browser to use zh-HK, then it would display zh-HK first, if user configure the browser to use zh-CN, then it would display zh-CN first.

Instruction to change Google Chrome's language setting is available at here. Note that you can skip the " Display Google Chrome in this language" step if you don't want to change that. You can also add multiple languages in Chrome.

For Firefox, see this youtube guide

IE.

Principle is the same for other browsers.

For a more technically detailed explanation, and instruction for mobile browsing environment, you can look at this w3c documentation.

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