Mobile Wikipedia looks more beautiful than desktop

Subjective. I prefer the desktop version with the right-hand infoboxes with the text flowed round them. That way most of the summary information is "above the fold".

Also, on my Android Chrome the foldable subsections are folded by default, which screws up links to subsections.

That's just like, your opinion, man.

More eloquently, I prefer the regular version. I prefer having all the interface already presented to me rather than hidden away. The one thing you could say is that the mobile version restricts itself to a narrower width automatically, but it's pretty trivial to write custom CSS to do the same for the regular version, or just resize your window. People still know about "move tab to new window" and how to resize their windows, right?

I wonder if it has to do with the fact that mobile devices have larger interfaces to compensate for things like fingers, and viewing that on a desktop means more whitespace and larger text.

The only thing that exceptionally bothers me is that the overview table on the right-hand side doesn't have any left padding in the first column.

On Chrome, I use the User-Agent Switcher extension [1] with the permanent spoof list to always load mobile Wikipedia when clicking Wikipedia links for exactly this reason.

It's not so much that it is more beautiful, but that it is a lot easier to read with bigger fonts and most importantly, a limited column width.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switche...

Yeah, no endlessly expanding line lengths, no tiny type. This should have been changed ages ago. (The only thing I dislike is the complicated process for switching to another language.)

Exactly https://twitter.com/simevidas/status/477123235616948224

Ironically, their mobile webpages do, but not their app. Tables render quite nicely on their mobile pages, but on their app they extend off-screen uselessly with no option to scroll.

Check this out, then view the same page on the Wikipedia app for an example: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popu...

Shameless plug: I despise Wikipedia's LHS menu (especially when I zoom in) and I made Chrome extension to hide it.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikisimplia-collap...

No adware/crapware. Works on most wikis.

Feels to me that mobile devices are so different than desktops in terms of interactivity, that everyone has to just step back and re-design. And it's kind of permission for everyone to re-design. Once it's all done if they didn't go responsive they end up with the "old" desktop site nobody wants to touch and the "new" mobile site with all that design work.

Not everything works 100%.

For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet

the color legend for the map works in desktop, does not in mobile.

OpenStreetMap's main interface also gets a lot of complaints about its looks. People miss the fact that both the main wikipedia site and OSM are also editing interfaces, and can't be optimized solely for usability in reading. (There's still room for improvement in both cases, but there's more to potentially break, too.)

Interesting to note that ctrl+shift+f, which on the desktop version is a shortcut to jump to the search area context, works in the mobile version but doesn't let you type (for some reason).

The design is clean, but I dislike the layout for big screens. But I have to admit that it is easier to read with the main column width being smaller.

Neither site is "beautiful." They are both just websites, and rather functional ones at that.