Wikipedia:Editing on mobile devices

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

Shortcuts WP:DEVICESWP:DEVICES WP:SMARTPHONEWP:SMARTPHONE

This page in a nutshell: We can edit Wikipedia on most mobile devices, despite certain difficulties.

Most mobile devices, including smartphones, allow editing Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:Mobile access for more details). This comes with a few limitations, described here. For a positive point of view and tips for effective smartphone editing, see Cullen328's essay Smartphone editing.

Mobile devices lack a mouse, and some may not have the kind of touch screen interface that allows selecting toolbar icons. Some kinds of formatting may be tricky or impossible, but basic wiki markup is always available.

Most Android or iOS devices contain cameras, and can upload an image to Wikipedia (Wikipedia:File upload wizard) or Wikimedia Commons. There is also a Commons app for Android.

Compatibility on mobile is limited. Wikipedia in mobile view does not show categories, nor most templates. Visual Editor on the mobile site may not work well with iPad's default browser.

Devices may change common edit summaries or WP:SHORTCUTS into something potentially offensive or unintelligible at the last second as you add them, particularly if you are experiencing lag, causing experienced editors to appear as vandals. Some of these accidental changes cannot be deleted or repaired without administrative help. Be vigilant.

Temporary accounts, automatically created for unregistered editors, are linked to a specific browser and device. A mobile unregistered editor who uses Wi-Fi in many different places will produce edits under many different IP addresses and, if they clear their cookies, make it more difficult to trace them to a single person. For one who uses the phone's carrier connection, there may be a large number of temporary accounts from one or two IP ranges, and each may be a sockpuppet or a genuinely different person. Traceability is not a major problem when editing is done in good faith. However, a disruptive "mobile vandal" may become a problem.

Registered users using a mobile app may not receive notifications.

Some people find editing from a phone to be slow, while others encounter no problems. With a small screen and no mouse, it can be hard for some to manipulate text onscreen. Editing text, cutting and pasting, and even reading is slow for some. Edit conflicts can lead to losing all your new text, and when it's a half-hour's typing it can seriously sap Wiki-morale. Smaller edits, with more frequent saves, can reduce the risk.

Navigation boxes are not displayed on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Briefly, these templates are not included because 1) they are not well designed for mobile, and 2) they significantly increase page sizes—bad for mobile downloads—in a way that is not useful for the mobile use case. Therefore, do not rely solely on navboxes for links to articles highly relevant to a particular article, or use them to display images via the |image= parameter to illustrate article content.

Scrolling is common in the edit window. To reduce the amount of scrolling required, log in and add this to Special:MyPage/common.css:

# wpTextbox1
{
    height: 27em;
}

to increase the number from the similarly default 27. The link to your personal CSS "Custom CSS" is located in the 'Appearance' tab of 'Preferences', under the 'Skin' section.

Though code exists that will limit exceeding the height of the editing window and keep it to within the browser window, the following code will invalidate it:

.mw-editform #wpTextbox1
{
    max-height: none;
}

This will allow the editing window to exceed the browser window. For iOS, the advantage here is that the editing window will become less likely to include secondary scrolling and more likely to employ only primary scrolling; moreover, this offers a workaround to the browser's "Find in page" function being unable to scroll down sufficiently to show all matches found.

Many editors write fully referenced articles and carry out other sophisticated edits on mobile devices, using the desktop site. Although most editing can wait until you are at your regular computer if you find mobile editing problematic, there are some edits that you may want to do on your mobile device:

• Things you may forget – If you remember some small detail while you have your smartphone but will likely forget it later, and the edit is small, this is a good time to make the edit.
• Wikignoming

Wikipedia's Mobile skin is named Minerva or MinervaNeue. It can be turned on in Special:Preferences/Appearance

You can customize the web interface by creating Special:MyPage/minerva.css and Special:MyPage/minerva.js.

There are some specific user scripts for Minerva:

• User:FR30799386/undo makes undo easier
• User:PAC2/chouette adds useful links for articles.

Alternatively, you can use Vector with User:TheDJ/mobileVector.css, which can be enabled on Special:MyPage/skin.js or Special:MyPage/common.js by adding

importStyleSheet('User:TheDJ/mobileVector.css')

On many devices, apps for Wikipedia are available that use an Internet connection to read the most recent version of any article. Some, such as the official Wikipedia app, enable both reading and editing; others enable reading only. The editing feature lacks the WYSIWYG features of the website's WP:Visual Editor.

Help desk

• Help:Mobile access
• Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia
• User:Cullen328/Smartphone editing
• User:Clovermoss/Mobile editing
• WP:Mobile communication bugs

• mw:Reading/Web/Advanced mobile contributions
• mw:Recommendations for mobile friendly articles on Wikimedia wikis