9 ms·

The Rise of Mobile Wikipedia

69 points by luu 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Anyone has an idea why the Germans use the mobile app so much?
- minikites 5y ago
  The German edition of Wikipedia is notable in many ways, it's arguably the second largest after English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi...
  - antasvara 5y ago
    Those characteristics don't explain why it has the largest relative view share in the Wikipedia mobile app.
clipradiowallet 5y ago
Does anyone use the actual mobile app? If so, why do you prefer it over the mobile web version? (I have not tried it and am curious)
- Tomte 5y ago
  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.
  - lacksconfidence 5y ago
    > it shows articles of places/features nearby That functionality is likely the same data as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby but with a better interface
    - Tomte 5y ago
      Yes, probably. I never noticed that. In the app it's in your face (first start asks for location services with explanation what for).
- occz 5y ago
  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.
- meibo 5y ago
  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.
- chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
  I use it so I can read wikipedia in dark mode
- sdumi 5y ago
  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.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  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.
- gpas 5y ago
  I use it, it's very well made. It's easy to search in different languages from the same field, it has tabs, favourites, themes...everything works.
- franga2000 5y ago
  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.
- askvictor 5y ago
  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.
- jobigoud 5y ago
  Top improvements of the mobile app vs the mobile site for me: - Access to the talk pages which are interesting to read on certain articles. - Improved multi-language support (You can select your preferred languages and quickly switch while searching) - The "My lists" feature. - It has its own tabs so it's easier to manage. I'm using "Wikipedia Beta" app.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
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. Stop posting en.m.wikipedia.org links!
- riffic 5y ago
  I'm in full agreement with you. Perhaps sites could automatically convert en.m.wikipedia.org into en.wikipedia.org. or you can do this client-side with an extension or tampermonkey sort of fix. To anyone pasting in wp links: be kind, take the m out of the url when sharing links.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    There already is a Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mobile2desktop-wikipedia/hgdfjjhaahfdggnecdecjekkimepkpaf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mobile2desktop-wik... 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.
  - thamer 5y ago
    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.
    - 5y ago
vernie 5y ago
Is there a workaround for the unsearchable collapsed default view for mobile Wikipedia pages?
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  I don't think so, because the sections are lazy-loaded, and also discarded when the page is instantiated. This also means that when you press the Back button, the sections are collapsed, and you lose the place where you just were. All-around a terrible design and implementation from usability perspective, in my opinion.
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    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.
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      > I can load any Wikipedia article, go offline, and still successfully expand all sections. This definitely has not been the case for me. If I don't expand the sections while online, I can't do it when offline.
- carlinmack 5y ago
  The app allows you to search within the article. Normally apps are a hard sell, but it's genuinely good
  - 5y ago
sharikone 5y ago
Perhaps it's me but I like to be able to edit articles and see discussions, and I haven't figured out how to do that from the mobile version. So I find myself constantly fighting the website to access the Desktop version
- nmstoker 5y ago
  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.
ranger207 5y ago
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
- cooper12 5y ago
  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.
fmajid 5y ago
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.
- nulld3v 5y ago
  You can also try this on your own phone with Kiwix: https://www.kiwix.org/en/ https://www.kiwix.org/en/. I keep an offline copy of Wikipedia on my phone just in case I need it someday.
  - fmajid 5y ago
    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.
zackmorris 5y ago
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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Enable_mobile_version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Enable_mobile_versio... 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.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Poor mans "What is my IP" curl -I https://en.wikipedia.org|sed -n "/^x-client-ip: /{s/.*: //p;}"

69 points by luu 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

Anyone has an idea why the Germans use the mobile app so much?

minikites 5y ago
The German edition of Wikipedia is notable in many ways, it's arguably the second largest after English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi...
- antasvara 5y ago
  Those characteristics don't explain why it has the largest relative view share in the Wikipedia mobile app.

clipradiowallet 5y ago

Does anyone use the actual mobile app? If so, why do you prefer it over the mobile web version? (I have not tried it and am curious)

Tomte 5y ago
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.
- lacksconfidence 5y ago
  > it shows articles of places/features nearby That functionality is likely the same data as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby but with a better interface
  - Tomte 5y ago
    Yes, probably. I never noticed that. In the app it's in your face (first start asks for location services with explanation what for).
occz 5y ago
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.
meibo 5y ago
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.
chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
I use it so I can read wikipedia in dark mode
sdumi 5y ago
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.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
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.
gpas 5y ago
I use it, it's very well made. It's easy to search in different languages from the same field, it has tabs, favourites, themes...everything works.
franga2000 5y ago
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.
askvictor 5y ago
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.
jobigoud 5y ago
Top improvements of the mobile app vs the mobile site for me: - Access to the talk pages which are interesting to read on certain articles. - Improved multi-language support (You can select your preferred languages and quickly switch while searching) - The "My lists" feature. - It has its own tabs so it's easier to manage. I'm using "Wikipedia Beta" app.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

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. Stop posting en.m.wikipedia.org links!

riffic 5y ago
I'm in full agreement with you. Perhaps sites could automatically convert en.m.wikipedia.org into en.wikipedia.org. or you can do this client-side with an extension or tampermonkey sort of fix. To anyone pasting in wp links: be kind, take the m out of the url when sharing links.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  There already is a Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mobile2desktop-wikipedia/hgdfjjhaahfdggnecdecjekkimepkpaf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mobile2desktop-wik... 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.
- thamer 5y ago
  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.
  - 5y ago

vernie 5y ago

Is there a workaround for the unsearchable collapsed default view for mobile Wikipedia pages?

forgotmypw17 5y ago
I don't think so, because the sections are lazy-loaded, and also discarded when the page is instantiated. This also means that when you press the Back button, the sections are collapsed, and you lose the place where you just were. All-around a terrible design and implementation from usability perspective, in my opinion.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  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.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    > I can load any Wikipedia article, go offline, and still successfully expand all sections. This definitely has not been the case for me. If I don't expand the sections while online, I can't do it when offline.
carlinmack 5y ago
The app allows you to search within the article. Normally apps are a hard sell, but it's genuinely good
- 5y ago

sharikone 5y ago

Perhaps it's me but I like to be able to edit articles and see discussions, and I haven't figured out how to do that from the mobile version. So I find myself constantly fighting the website to access the Desktop version

nmstoker 5y ago
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.

ranger207 5y ago

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

cooper12 5y ago
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.

fmajid 5y ago

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.

nulld3v 5y ago
You can also try this on your own phone with Kiwix: https://www.kiwix.org/en/ https://www.kiwix.org/en/. I keep an offline copy of Wikipedia on my phone just in case I need it someday.
- fmajid 5y ago
  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.

zackmorris 5y ago

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Enable_mobile_version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Enable_mobile_versio... 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.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Poor mans "What is my IP" curl -I https://en.wikipedia.org|sed -n "/^x-client-ip: /{s/.*: //p;}"