Mobile wikipedia is one of the biggest scourges of the HN comments. People just won't stop linking to it, because they know better than me which version of wikipedia I'd prefer to view.
It isn't done out of malice. People simply copy paste whatever is in their browser.
"m." subdomains are just a totally outdated concept and I wish they would disappear entirely. It is trivial for the web server to detect what device type, OS, screen size etc. the user is on and serve content accordingly.
> "m." subdomains are just a totally outdated concept
Yes. Some might argue otherwise, but I'm with you there except…
… sometimes the mobile version of a page is preferable as it cuts out a load of crap including adverts and other distractions, just giving you the information actually being linked to. So "m." type links or other "force mobile view" options can be accidentally useful for a purpose beyond what their designer intended.
> It is trivial for the web server to detect what device [properties]
No, it is not trivial to do this reliably server-side with no client-side assistance. It is much better where possible to do it client-side with well-designed CSS (maybe, but not necessarily, making use of media queries and such).
There is an exception here too: if you want to send less data to the mobile client, instead of sending everything you would send to others and adjusting styles to alter the display for small screens and finger-based input, then you need to either try detect the UA's properties or given the user an explicit "full or minimal" option (which may put you back to offering an "m." URL or equivalent so a user can jump direct to the minimal version).
If your site is not responsible and you have a mobile version, please, place a mobile selector on the header of your pages, and a cookie on the client with the option.
I use the "m." subdomain on some sites on purpose, when on the desktop—though not on Wikipedia, as they cut so much content out of the "m" site, it's awful, I don't even like it on mobile, though if it actually had all the content I'd probably prefer it everywhere.
That's more convenient than having to change my user agent or simply having mobile versions unavailable unless I shrink my browser window down to phone-sized.
These days if you follow responsive design (why wouldn’t you?) you’ll never need an m. subdomain. I don’t think Wikipedia should have any less functionality or information on mobile.
I stopped using it a while ago because it wound up breaking something else, I don't remember what it was exactly though.
But honestly this is just something Wikipedia itself should handle -- if I'm logged in to Wikipedia, give me a setting to "always redirect mobile to desktop".
Wikipedia created the problem with the "m" subdomain, they ought to be the ones fixing it too.
Interesting to see that people dislike the mobile version so much! I only use the mobile version, it's so much more readable.
I literally wrote a script that does the exact opposite of what you suggest!
I have one script that runs on all pages and converts all Wikipedia links to the mobile version, while another that runs on Wikipedia only and automatically redirects to the mobile version if I somehow land on a non-mobile Wikipedia page. It also has a shortcut to switch between mobile and desktop, and takes the referrer into account so that once I've switched to the desktop version links aren't pointing to the mobile version again. It has a couple more features like a shortcut to edit the page, since I often contribute.
It seems like we're rapidly converging on the idea "websites could be dumb content, and the browsers should decide how it should be laid out." Perhaps we can have something like this, maybe in the far distant future of 25 years ago...
>I only use the mobile version, it's so much more readable.
Same. Once I discovered that, and that the mobile site didn't have the random stalls from loading login.wikimedia.org, I started using it exclusively. The hardest part was retraining my muscle memory to type !wm instead of !wiki when searching for something.
The one to rewrite all WP links on all pages is part of a larger script which I haven't cleaned up yet, but this already provides an automatic switch to mobile if you happen to load a desktop version of the page.
They're linking to the mobile version because they're entering the comment with a mobile phone that makes it far easier to copy the full URL and makes it, well, not difficult, but harder than with a full keyboard to edit out the subdomain.
If I'm on a desktop, have a moment, and see one that's particularly egregious, I often respond with a comment to the full version linking to the appropriate table of contents anchor.
Well, the "mobile" Wikipedia design is vastly better on desktop than the default desktop design, but I suppose that's a matter of personal preference.
The only sense in which a mobile link "forces" you to see a specific design is that en.wikipedia will redirect to en.m.wikipedia on mobile devices, but the inverse is not the case: en.m.wikipedia will not redirect to en.wikipedia on a desktop computer.
But here's the thing: the only way for me to ensure that all Wikipedia pages will use the mobile design on my desktop is to either 1. create an account to change my theme preference and always be logged in on all devices, or 2. use some browser extension. Both of those options are roughly as difficult, and option 2 is also available for you to ensure that you always see the desktop design!
en.wikpedia.org will serve the appropriate version automatically which seems the right thing to do, old.reddit.com will explicitly override someone's Reddit preference so that seems backwards.
IMO the link that results in the users preference being followed should always be preferred, not the link that forces the preference of the poster.
If anyone at Wikipedia is reading this, could you please show the table of contents (TOC) at the top of the page in mobile mode so that we can click and hold the anchor links to copy them? Or add an option to show TOC. Or at least make the section headers actual links.
The use case here is that some enthusiasts like to share their Wikipedia crawls and especially the "leaf" links at the end of filtering those search trees. Right now their perception is that mobile mode prevents them from doing the one thing that they most enjoy about Wikipedia, which is collaborating.
If there's already a way to access the anchor links from mobile, then by all means enlighten us.
Actually, after YEARS of dealing with this inconvenience, it just occurred to me to try turning off mobile mode entirely. It turns out that you can do this at the bottom of any Wikipedia page by clicking the "Desktop" link. You can go back by clicking the "Mobile view" link:
You can also click on the hamburger menu -> Settings -> Expand all sections. This is nice for reducing friction during deep Wikipedia crawls where we're skimming large amounts of information. Mobile mode seems to be designed for more of a neurotypical way of browsing data in a top-down fashion, rather than casting a wide net and brainstorming ideas in parallel.
The text itself isn't lazy-loaded – I can load any Wikipedia article, go offline, and still successfully expand all sections. Images are lazy-loaded, though, and while this has some merits, for the offline use-case this is equally somewhat annoying.
Also yes about the scroll position – while at least occasionally (possibly within the same session, but not if you're closing and later re-opening the whole browser) it seems like Wikipedia tries remembering which sections were opens and which were collapsed, it happens too late in comparison to the browser attempting the restore your scroll position. So if you had scrolled farther than you can scroll in the completely unepxanded state of the stage, your scroll position will be lost.
If I need to search, I get around this by just scrolling to the bottom of the article and uncollapsing each section from the bottom to the top. This ends up being very fast for most articles, because uncollapsing the lowest section won't move any of the previous sections, so you can tap through them quickly.
My biggest gripes with the mobile versions, app and website, are the lack of categories at the bottom of the page. It seems that there's been a de-emphasis of categories in general on Wikipedia. I hope they don't get rid of it though, because it's a fantastic way to organize related content. The contents of a category box often show relations between subjects better than the article itself
On the mobile site, go to the settings in the sidebar and enable Advanced Mode.
And no, they won't ever get rid of categories. It's just that the phone variants of the site are very heavily geared towards a specific type of reader, at the expense of editors or other types of users. They have been trying to address this over incremental updates though, such as now showing talk pages.
The official app is genuinely well made and has nice features like selecting your favorite languages, saving entries in lists, tabs, and offline reading.
I think it's one of the few things on my phone that I actually prefer the app version of.
I do. As others have said, it's built well and feels smoother to use than the site does.
Note that this is not an issue of speed, wikipedia in the browser is plenty fast. It's smoothness — the app's navigation model is better adapted to the use case, it's themed to match the OS perfectly, and there's no extraneous browser chrome or other little browserisms dragging down the experience.
If the iPad version got a Mac Catalyst port I'd probably use that on the desktop too.
I don't have it anymore but I used to (like 2 years ago). It was genuinely one of the most well-made apps I've used. Everything was just so smooth and well-optimised for touch control.
One of my favourite features were the summaries (like ther hover cards that sometimes appear on desktop now) and reading lists, which are basically bookmarks but hyper-optimised for Wikipedia articles. All of it was something you could already do with a browser, but it was just way more streamlined.
I do. Given that it's a native app, it behaves a bit better on mobile than its web-counterpart. Links to Wikipedia open in the app, so the experience is not that disrupted when switching from web (or other apps) to the app.
I use it because I like to have all my wiki tabs in one place. I can also save tabs for offline reading. The app is very nice to use and it feels faster than the browser: one of the few cases where I like the app more than the web equivalent.
I use it, mainly for dark mode. Only think that really annoys me is rendering of tables - text within doesn't re-flow to fit the mobile screen. Not sure if this is also a problem in mobile web as I don't really use that.
Not anymore, the website suffices for me, but what stood out in my opinion is that a) the app is beautiful and b) it shows articles of places/features nearby.
There is a project to seed North Korea with Korean-language versions of Wikipedia and literature on USB memory sticks using the offline ZIM format, and thus impervious to Internet censorship. The entire English-language Wikipedia including images is a mere 82GB, which is now ridiculously cheap.
Yes, I keep it on my iPad Pro for Kiwix as well. I hardly ever use my phone so I don't usually buy them with enough free memory to hold the 82GB ZIM file.
I also like the section menus for pages that the mobile version dispenses with (which is annoying when you want to share a specific section with someone, all the more important as finding text on a page for the minimised sections that mobile uses is v. awkward). Plus it hides other content at the end of articles (eg primarily the categories section but also other boxes/details too)
The version you get served when using an m. URL but forcing the mobile browser to view Desktop pages is something of a compromise - it has a sharper design than the proper desktop mode but it still lacks the categories.
Stop posting en.m.wikipedia.org links!