Not all uses of Wikipedia are the types of reading supported by works and research in long-form reading. Hell, many, many Wikipedia articles aren't long-form, a

Not all uses of Wikipedia are the types of reading supported by works and research in long-form reading. Hell, many, many Wikipedia articles aren't long-form, and paragraph text is a minority of content on some table-heavy articles. The issue isn't with width but a lack of user preferences, logged in and not. You don't need user accounts, cookies, persistence, or frankly even Javascript to change the content width on an article. The skin designer can set the best practice for a contrived ideal use case as the default, and still let anyone with other use cases expand the content's max-width to fill more space. EDIT: Looks like they added one — there's now a "Toggle limited content width" button now appearing for me in the bottom-right corner of the wider desktop views.