Sunshine

VarunFEB2003
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Tone down the bright blue of wikilinking

Linking, which is often overused on Wikipedia, looks seriously messy in densely linked text and makes reading more difficult. You can very easily change the display colour of links on your monitor from the current gaudy blue to a more subtle shade. Try it and see. It will take two minutes; here's how.

  • (1) First, choose how subtle you want your links to look: here's a comparison over whole paragraphs of the current default colour with four other, decreasingly bright colours.
  • (2) Create your own user stylesheet, if you haven’t done so already, at your monobook.css / vector.css page.
  • (3) At the top of that page, paste in the following, starting with "a" and ending with the curly bracket: a { color: #003366 } (this one is for midnight blue, the second darkest—simply replace that code with the one that suits you on the comparison page).
  • (4) Then go to your user preferences. Make sure that you've selected "Never underline links" under Miscellaneous.

Clear your cache, and you're done. To use another colour, simply replace "midnightblue" with the name of your choice; remove the pasted text to return to the default. Feedback on this is welcome on my talk page. I'd like to see WikiMedia adopt this as the default colour, and decouple the date-autoformatting and linking functions: it's ridiculous that dates have to be blue links to activate the formatting mechanism.