OK, I found that I can disable the "birthday mode" by scrolling deep into the "Appearance" section of the sidebar, but this is not really a solution. I've been writing on Wikipedia for more than twenty years and programming MediaWiki for fifteen, and it took me ten minutes to find it. I suspect that it will take other people more time. This is unacceptable.

I did some informal user testing of my own and asked several people of different ages and genders who were not logged in to hide the baby globe. 100% of them clicked the "Hide" button, which doesn't hide the baby globe, but does hide the whole sidebar that includes the actual buttons to hide the baby globe. After that, it was hard to find how to reopen this bar. This is informal and perhaps not comprehensive enough, but it does show that hiding it is not as easy for everyone as it should be.

In T418428#11663995, @Soda wrote:

Ideally, it shouldn't appear at all.

Please find consensus for this statement. Current consensus on English Wikipedia is contrary to what you claim and you have been told so. Thanks.

... And someone responded that the currently deployed version is not quite what the consensus was. The consensus was to have a "reasonably prominent button to disable it", and this is quite questionable. And User:S Marshall, who summarized the previous consensus, wrote in the later discussion: "I'd like to apologise wholeheartedly to the community for my role in this. :( I'm appalled."

So it's not exactly the consensus.

I did some informal user testing of my own and asked several people of different ages and genders who were not logged in to hide the baby globe. 100% of them clicked the "Hide" button, which doesn't hide the baby globe, but does hide the whole sidebar that includes the actual buttons to hide the baby globe. After that, it was hard to find how to reopen this bar. This is informal and perhaps not comprehensive enough, but it does show that hiding it is not as easy for everyone as it should be.

I don't know the methodology for your experiments. There is a huge toggle right below the baby globe; it is going to be extremely hard for anyone to miss this toggle.

I asked several people to hide the globe and everyone clicked "hide" instead of clicking "Disabled".

In T418428#11664986, @Amire80 wrote:

In T418428#11663995, @Soda wrote:

Ideally, it shouldn't appear at all.

Please find consensus for this statement. Current consensus on English Wikipedia is contrary to what you claim and you have been told so. Thanks.

... And someone responded that the currently deployed version is not quite what the consensus was. The consensus was to have a "reasonably prominent button to disable it", and this is quite questionable. And User:S Marshall, who summarized the previous consensus, wrote in the later discussion: "I'd like to apologise wholeheartedly to the community for my role in this. :( I'm appalled."

So it's not exactly the consensus.

Consensus is not defined as: "one person said they now don't like it". There was a widely advertised RFC through which the community agreed to have this decoration. Also, as shown in my screenshot, there is a clear way to disable the GIF, so I am unsure why you think there isn't a consensus on this specific implementation. I know for a fact my vote was based on this specific implementation.

I asked several people to hide the globe, and everyone clicked "hide" instead of clicking "Disabled".

N=?, the lack of people complaining about how to turn it off in Help desk, social media, or Teahouse, I feel like, is a strong indicator of the contrary to your characterization here. I agree that the UI could be clearer, but that is hardly a reason enough to override community consensus based on a small-scale experiment in this context (lacking any pushback from readers)

In T418428#11665265, @Soda wrote:

the lack of people complaining about how to turn it off in Help desk, social media, or Teahouse, I feel like, is a strong indicator of the contrary to your characterization here. I agree that the UI could be clearer, but that is hardly a reason enough to override community consensus based on a small-scale experiment in this context (lacking any pushback from readers)

This kind of ignores all the people who expressed their dislike of it on Village pump (technical). I was not the first and the last of them; people keep adding negative comments about it on today, March 2. It's not "consensus".

The comparison to Vector 2022, which robertsky made in the Village pump (technical), is also not entirely valid, because that change affected all pages, and this one affects only several thousands.

In T418428#11665297, @Amire80 wrote:

In T418428#11665265, @Soda wrote:

the lack of people complaining about how to turn it off in Help desk, social media, or Teahouse, I feel like, is a strong indicator of the contrary to your characterization here. I agree that the UI could be clearer, but that is hardly a reason enough to override community consensus based on a small-scale experiment in this context (lacking any pushback from readers)

This kind of ignores all the people who expressed their dislike of it on Village pump (technical). I was not the first and the last of them; people keep adding negative comments about it on today, March 2. It's not "consensus".

The comparison to Vector 2022, which robertsky made in the Village pump (technical), is also not entirely valid, because that change affected all pages, and this one affects only several thousands.

I will stand by what I said, a widely-advertised RFC trumps a vocal minority or even a local consensus. Consensus is not "everyone agrees on something". If it were "everyone agrees on something", Wikipedia might have very different text about how round the Earth is.

Again, this is not to say that the UI couldn't be improved, but I don't believe the eventual goal of removal is backed by consensus.

The main problem of this is not described in the issue which makes it difficult to see the importance and urgency of this. My task about that was closed as duplicate so I'll put the explanation about the main problem for why a change is needed as well as the proposed solution below:

I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merv and on the right there is now a huge whitespace with the baby globe that makes the text very narrow. I could not find out how to hide the baby globe.

I hovered the mouse on it and clicked on it but that didn't explain how to hide it. I found it by opening the article in a tab in a private window which shows the appearance panel again. That panel is not displayed when logged in because there's no reason to keep it there after configuring the appearance things. I forgot about these settings even and certainly it's not self-explanatory that hiding the baby globe is possible there.

Please add some info how to hide the baby globe to users who have the appearance panel hidden (I think that's most who are logged in or don't use sth that frequently deletes cookies). For example, one could show a tooltip like "To hide this panel with baby globe open the appearance settings (glasses button at the top)".

This is needed to properly read the article content when windows aren't hugely wide but narrow or reasonably-sized. An alternative would be to have the baby globe above the article content without having a whole panel on the right or to just have a small tile of whitespace reserved for it but not the whole right side.

It should be just an X button that closes it.

@Prototyperspective Can you post a screenshot of how it looks in the default state for you ? For me there is a clear way to disable it using the appearance menu either below (or right above in the user tray).

@Soda: replying to your question in Prototyperspective's absence, this is a screenshot of my default state:

1. click the eyeglasses next to "Donate"
2. click "Disabled" under Birthday Mode
3. click the eyeglasses again (or some users may click "Move to sidebar" followed by "Hide" if they don't think to click the eyeglasses)

Note that this only affects users who have chosen to hide the appearance sidebar.