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Comment by seppel | Hacker News Reader

The sole critique of the UX of Wikipedia that I have is that the normal version of Wikipedia redirects you to the mobile version when using a mobile device, and changes the URL while doing so. This is why we end up with all these m.wikipedia links. The mobile version, however, does not redirect you to the normal page when using a normal computer.

So people like myself constantly have to edit the "m." from wikipedia links to get the normal version. I really dont get why they are doing that.

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Also, the mobile version collapsing the zippies, which means search doesn't work.

On mobile wikipedia site go to hamburger icon - settings and then Expand all sections

Oh, nice, this is apparently a persistent setting too! Thanks!

What are "zippies"? I tried searching but couldn't find a relevant definition.

Sometimes called accordion menus. See: https://jqueryui.com/accordion/

On Wikipedia, the content section headers. More generally, expandable sections of a page that default to being collapsed.

I wonder if there's a functional reason why they do this, rather than just implementing responsive design / media queries? I seem to remember more sites doing this ~5 years ago, but based on what I see, it has fallen out of favour.

(Actually found some info if anyone is curious: https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/w.... Though the article helps explain some of the context and reasoning, I don't think it really justifies the divergent experience and imperceptible progress on improving the desktop experience)

I made extension that does exactly that if you want

https://github.com/spixy/NoMoreMobile/blob/master/README.md

That's appreciated, thank you. I already have such an extension to redirect reddit to old.reddit. It works and I can somehow see why such a thing might be necessary for commercialized platforms such as reddit.

However, I'm suprised that this is neccessary for wikipedia. I guess it was more work to write the extension than to fix whatever is going on on wikipedias side. But then, on the other hand, maybe writing the extension and stop caring about what is going on on wikipedia is easier.

Firstly, at the bottom of the page in either desktop or mobile you can get to the other with a mobile/desktop link. (Discoverability fail maybe?)

Secondly, there's discussion about serving everything from a single domain at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998 , which I guess would enable the normal mobile browser feature of switching between desktop and mobile.

> Firstly, at the bottom of the page in either desktop or mobile you can get to the other with a mobile/desktop link. (Discoverability fail maybe?)

For a long page, scrolling to the bottom might take even longer than just changing the URL. Yes, there are keyboard shortcuts to scroll to the bottom, but so there are shortcuts to edit the URL bar. It is, in any case, an annoyance that always(!) takes some extra time.

[Edit: I love that switching to the desktop version is literally the very last word/link of the mobile version. Even after the link to the "Privacy policy" and the "Terms of Use" that probably nobody in the history of homo sapiens ever clicked]

> Secondly, there's discussion about serving everything from a single domain at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998 , which I guess would enable the normal mobile browser feature of switching between desktop and mobile.

The last comment on this discussion is, quite ironically: "Have been somewhat expecting this to be fixed for the better part of 7+ years now. Hopefully this can be implemented soon!"

Except there should not be two versions at all and instead they should just make the desktop version responsive and strip out the bloat - I don't want an article to on desktop to load six different javascript files and have a giant banner at the top any more than on mobile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test is 27 different requests for me - that is inexcusable for mostly text content.

I'll never understand the lack of a "prefer full site" link in the footer of every page. Common sense / table stakes for usability since forever.

I honestly think they were exploring replacing the desktop version with mobile at some point and used desktop m. removal as a gauge of aversion to the change.

That can't be true because the mobile version doesn't allow access to all of Wikipedia's functionality, such as talk pages, unless they've made some serious changes. (More precisely, I don't remember there being any way to get from an article to the article's talk page without editing the URL in the mobile version.)

This was fixed quite some time ago, there's now a Discussion tab/link on the mobile version.

Can you tell me you I can get there, e.g., here? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test

The work "discuss" does not show up in the source code, you can check "curl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test | grep -i discuss"

The discussion is called "talk" on the desktop version, but it is also missing on the mobile one. Or there is some javascript trickery going on, but I clearly dont get it.

Not sure why you're missing but https://i.imgur.com/llv2rtc.png

This is how it looks in my Firefox: https://imgur.com/a/x2Gl1Sj

And this is how it looks in my Chrome: https://imgur.com/a/LQ7pmH8

Ah, you're right.

You need to login and enable "advanced mode" in setting (in hamburger menu) to see it.

I see.

But this also means that every mobile user of wikipedia (I guess the majority now?) which is not logged in and enabled that feature (for sure the majority) does not even know about the discussion pages of wikipedia articles. This is super sad.

I find the mobile version to be pretty poor and mostly the opposite of what I want when using wikipedia in a mobile capacity.

Mobile has higher latency and a small screen, so its important that I not need to make lots of request and its important that I can search inside documents. Both of which are broken by wikipedia's mobile interface.

Facebook also does this.

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