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Improve readability of popular documentation pages on mobile
Open, In Progress, MediumPublic

Description

Identify documentation pages popular on desktop and mobile, and review these pages to ensure they display correctly on mobile devices.

Focus on Recommendations for mobile friendly articles on Wikimedia wikis, but also take ideas from Adaptable UX to various devices into account.

Rationale

As per Wikimedia Statistics, mobile devices generated 22-50% of monthly page views on mediawiki.org in 2024 (average of 33%). It's important to ensure our documentation is as readable and usable on mobile devices as it is on desktop.

Plan

  • Identify pages to review
  • Review and fix the identified pages, improve or create new templates where necessary
  • Consider writing down documentation-focused good practices for mobile readability

Event Timeline

KBach changed the task status from Open to In Progress.Jan 7 2025, 10:35 AM
KBach triaged this task as Medium priority.
KBach moved this task from Backlog to In progress on the Tech-Docs-Team board.

I have prepared a list of pages to review (on mediawiki.org and Wikitech) based on page views statistics. I'm now reviewing these pages.

This is still in progress - I've reviewed over 100 pages and identified common issues.

I'm planning to review 30-60 more pages while developing solutions to the problems I've found so far.

This is still in progress. I reviewed around 40 additional pages and catalogued the most common issues on a sandbox page on mediawiki.org. I will create a similar page for Wikitech.

I'm still in the process of developing solutions to these problems. Some are relatively straightforward, e.g. replacing a table with a definition list for better readability. Some might require CSS changes in popular templates and need more consideration.

This is still in progress. I made a change to the Ombox template on mediawiki.org and to the alignment of the Coolest Tool Award badge on the PAWS page on Wikitech.

I'm still working on:

  • Improvements to the Caution template on mediawiki.org
  • Improvements to code snippets on some pages on Wikitech
  • Minor improvements to individual elements on different pages
  • Improvements to the way some images are displayed on mobile devices (lower priority)

Also, if my changes to Ombox receive no negative feedback until next week, I'll propagate them to other message box templates.

This is still in progress. I propagated the changes made to Ombox to other message box templates, made improvements to code snippets on Wikitech, and some other individual elements on different pages.

I'm still working on the changes to the Caution template.