Reading/Web/Mobile

The Foundation's reading team evolved from a team called the mobile web team.

The mobile web team was responsible for the Mobile Web experience of MediaWiki sites including Wikipedia. It comprises many components, at the core of which is MobileFrontend, an extension which provides the foundations of the mobile web experience. This page aims to describe some high level concepts of what this mobile web experience is, how we going about building this and how you can get involved.

About

The mobile interface of a Wikimedia project can be reached by visiting langcode.m.X.org (where X is the name of a Wikimedia project)

For instance:

Alternatively, any user on a mobile device going to a domain without .m will generally be redirected by our Varnish proxy to the mobile interface.

When a user views one of the above URLs they are presented with a screen layout that is appropriate for their device. Articles are automatically reformatted but the home page is not. In order for a homepage to be mobile friendly it has to be configured with the appropriate selectors.

Beta Features

To see additional features of the mobile site that are not 100% production ready, on many of Wikimedia's sites we provide a beta experience which you can opt in. If you opt in, be aware that there is a higher likelihood of experiencing bugs or other weird issues than when you use the stable version of the site. So, consider yourself warned!

To opt in, tap on the main menu (hamburger icon) next to the search bar to open the navigation menu. Tap 'Settings'. Then, tap the toggle next to 'Beta' from 'off' to 'on'.

Get involved

Install it on your own wiki

Other users help make this product generic and ensure quality. Visit the extension page for information on how to do this.

Talk

Come join us in the IRC channel #wikimedia-mobile ^connect and get involved and talk about our current projects
Start or help with conversation in one of our many open tasks
Use the beta version of the mobile site and get involved with development of features, giving the extension feedback and reporting bugs.
Install this Chrome extension and force yourself to always use mobile on desktop and help us identify things that need mobilizing

Translate

Join the team of translators on translatewiki and help translate the extension. No coding skills necessary!

Design

Buggy Transitions, errors or strange UX? Leave us a note on this page. Before commenting, bear in mind how best to give design feedback.

Find out more about how we work with designers and how you can get involved here.

Code

First things first, get setup.

Coding with MobileFrontend

Try out the code on GitHub or Diffusion and get a local version up and running!
Read and understand our code

Release process

We're migrating to a release process for our maintained extensions. Read about it.

Features and design

Find out more about our current features and stay up to date with our design work on the Projects page.

Performance

This is a big subject - Reading/Web/Performance.

QA

See QA

Communications

Notifications launch on mobile, Wikimedia blog, August 30th 2013
Edit Wikipedia on the go, Wikimedia blog, July 25th 2013
Go on a Wikipedia scavenger hunt with Wikipedia Nearby, Wikimedia blog, May 2013
Help illustrate Wikipedia: uploads now live on mobile web, Wikimedia blog, March 28th 2013
Call for testers on our new Mobile gateway prototype, Wikimedia blog, June 10th, 2011.