12-26-08: Edited to acknowledge the hypocrisy of the new even more intrusive video ads to the right on this site. Tehehehehe.

I love Wikipedia, I really do.  In fact, one of the things I really appreciate about Wikipedia and the open-source community in general is the rejection of advertizing and the non-profit nature of it all.  However, sometimes nagware can be annoying, and I refuse to be annoyed by a computer.  One of my favorite Firefox plugins and probably the most useful is Adblock Plus.  Adblock Plus downloads a free, continually updated list of filters for things that should be blocked, and it does an amazing job of killing the ads on most sites without even wasting bandwidth downloading the ads.  Now, this may be great for the user, but I believe that it’s also not too terrible for the advertizers…if people that obviously aren’t going to be click on your ads anyway because they despise advertizing as a whole, why not let them do you a favor and save you bandwidth?  They don’t want to see your crappy banners and annoying flash pop-ups, so why try to get around Adblock?  Just accept it as an advertizing opt-out.  Now, Wikipedia should be accepting of this mentality more than anyone, so it’s with that reasoning that I publish a very simple hack that anyone remotely familiar with the way ABP and javascript works could easily figure out for themselves.  Without further ado, I give you the filter that will remove the annoying header from Wikipedia:

|*centralnotice.js?192xx

Be sure to include the bar “|” at the beginning. As a more generalized filter that would probably block stuff in the future, you could also try:

|*centralnotice.js*

but I have not yet tested it as they have not yet changed their banner. To add this filter, simply pop open ABP and click the “Add Filter” button at the bottom left of the ABP dialog and paste or type it in there. Couldn’t be easier. Enjoy.