Unifying our mobile and desktop domains
12 comments
·November 25, 2025SchemaLoad
layer8
YouTube? Twitch? FaceBook? GSMArena? There are lots.
sedatk
m.youtube.com and m.facebook.com redirect you to main "m-less" domain when on desktop. That was the greatest problem with Wikipedia. You had to experience that mobile layout on desktop unless you edited the address line and reloaded the page.
janpio
Great job.
I was hoping this was a unification of the both layouts as well, that would have been really impressive. The mobile version of the article pages is great, but getting both versions from the same frontend would be an amazing case study.
bawolff
The mobile site is relatively unpopular among editors, i think there would be a riot if they did that.
That said, there is a "desktop" version of the mobile skin, you can get it by appending ?useskin=minerva to a wikipedia url.
sedatk
That's a welcome development albeit late, but more importantly, they should address the "can't link to a highlight" problem on mobile. When all sections are collapsed by default, browser won't scroll to the relevant section.
A random "link to highlight" example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_I_of_Cyprus#:~:text=On%2...
Such a link doesn't work on mobile if it points inside a collapsed section.
That makes directing people to relevant content on mobile really hard, and I end up sending screenshots instead.
EDIT: "Link to fragment"s had the same problem, but apparently, they fixed it. Thanks for that too!
lxgr
Finally! But…
> Wikipedia’s use of it is surprising to our present day audience, and it may decrease the perceived strength of domain branding
Really? That’s the reasoning, and not the fact that mobile links forwarded to desktop browsers would render the mobile view?!
pr337h4m
The mobile view is a really pleasant reading experience on desktop.
bawolff
> Really? That’s the reasoning, and not the fact that mobile links forwarded to desktop browsers would render the mobile view?!
If you read the more technical internal rationals instead of just the press release, what you said is mentioned as one of the reasons for the change
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Mobile_d...
jonny_eh
Now it's your turn YouTube…
About 10 years late, I can't think of any websites other than Wikipedia still doing the mobile domain.