Wikidata engineers should spend some time assessing how Wikidata uses MobileFrontend/Minerva and determine whether it should continue to operate in that way or change it's strategic direction. In 2023 better options exist then the ones we had in 2012. I suggest an engineer evaluates the 3 options below and makes a decision on the approach that makes most sense for Wikidata.

Background

MobileFrontend provides various features

1. creates a separate mobile site (skin) for your mobile traffic,
2. provides various content transformations to make your content more friendly (mostly designed for removing content via the nomobile class)
3. simplifies mobile footer and adds a desktop/mobile site link,
4. provides replacements for special pages that are not mobile friendly: Special:Watchlist, Special:Preferences
5. provides a beta mode with a feature management system for adding experimental features for anonymous users.

The WMF web team has recently been working towards minimizing the functions of MobileFrontend to #1-#3 in the list above and reducing the technology gap between mobile and desktop experiences.

Over the years Wikidata.org has developed various customizations that are tied to MobileFrontend and Minerva. Despite this additional code, Wikidata.org seems to lack many functions on mobile that exist on desktop. It also seems to not make use of the content transformations that MobileFrontend provides, in fact seems to workaround and from the look of it may even disable some of them (for example section collapsing is not available on https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:About_data)

There are a few paths that should be evaluated.

Possible options

Keep the status quo

Pros: Doing nothing is always the easiest option; Having completely separate sites means you can maintain completely different experiences (At a. cost)
Cons: Maintaining a mobile and desktop experience may be expensive given work by the web team. For example, in future the plan is for Minerva to use the same search as desktop and it's not clear how that would impact Wikidata (T275252). Over time this may require for maintenance work to keep up with the evolving Minerva/MobileFrontend codebases.

Disable MobileFrontend, continue using Minerva

Upon inspection of Wikidata.org I noticed that the desktop Minerva skin performs quite well on mobile devices (barring a few minor modifications), potentially even better than the mobile skin.

The Minerva desktop skin can be enabled either via query string or by user preference:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1?useskin=minerva

I found minor issues that could easily be rectified using the following user/site styles:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Jdlrobson/minerva.css

The code that switches skins, could be reduced to a simple configuration change that sets wgDefaultSkin when the mobile domain is detected.

Pros: Wikidata.org will not be impacted negatively by any upstream changes in MobileFrontend / Minerva. Site will be more performant; Completely in control of Wikidata engineers - no need for support from teams at WMF.
Cons: The Wikidata desktop code is not quite optimized for mobile so there would be work to do here by wikidata maintainers

Limit MobileFrontend, continue using Minerva

You could disable the various unused functions in MobileFrontend to minimize the differences between the mobile and desktop site. For example if you need section collapsing but not the special pages, you could use configuration to disable the special pages.

Pros: Limited benefits on short term; Retain useful features; Remove unnecessary
Cons: You'd still need to remove all the MobileFrontend specific checks inside Wikidata.

Use responsive version of Vector 2022

The Desktop Improvements (Vector 2022) project has worked hard to improve the responsiveness of Vector 2022. Currently the web team intentionally only supports down to 500px but could be convinced to support a responsive skin if we had motivation.

There is a small amount of work remaining by web team to realize this (see T319305) but a Wikidata engineer can imagine this by using Vector 2022 on a mobile device on Wikidata using the following user script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jdlrobson/responsiveVector2022.js

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/286/should_vector_be_responsive/

Pros: Web team are motivated to make Vector 2022 mobile friendly; Wikidata mobile experience would benefit from all features currently desktop only
Cons: Some editors may dislike a responsive skin and would require some community outreach (they can easily opt out using existing preferences in Special:preferences); The Vector 2022 skin is not quite mobile friendly and WMF web team need to be onboard with any changes here.

Have a Wikidata-only skin

Having a Wikidata only skin allows Wikidata to have its own distinct brand optimized for its own features. Special:ContentTranslation took this approach to sandbox it from changes by other teams.

Pros: Wikidata can make decisions around page rendering.
Cons: More work required to create a new skin