Could be using CSS position: fixed. But idk there could be other more sophisticated ways to accomplish the same thing.

In terms of why to not use it, I can think of reasons to avoid it by default. Like it could be very annoying on some devices in some situations. If the page authors made the table headings really long, it could obscure the content. I know I have been annoyed by this sort of thing when websites use position: fixed for their navigation or other elements. When I’ve snooped around the backend of wikipedia I see that they are contending with a wide variety of contributors and users and whatever they do needs to accommodate everyone.

What I find surprising is that there is (apparently) no 3rd party browser extension, userstyle or userscript that allows enabling this.

It sucks because the info is all there! Someone has gone to the trouble to put it in and everything.

Like I said in the top post I honestly don’t understand how these large tables even get updated… How do the authors know what they are even editing?? There has to be a trick.

Freezing the top row (when wanted by the user) would be an actual legitimate use of that annoying thing where websites have their navigation bar persistently at the top of the window.

Thanks for taking the time! But it doesn’t properly reproduce the content.

As an example, here is the very bottom left corner from the wikipedia:

there is a merge row with content “5 TSMC N5”. Same height as merged row in next column, with content “Zen 4”.

But in the google sheet:

those row containing “5 TSMC N5” have all be un-merged into 14 separate rows. However for some reason “Zen 4” has been properly copied?

I would need 2+ very large displays to compare the two documents side by side but from what i can see on my 1 small display there are many such inconsistencies. My experience is that cleaning up the data is impossible.