Currently www.wikipedia.org is not mobile friendly - when served to a
mobile device it appears the same as the desktop site meaning a user
has to zoom and scroll around the page (see bug 30389 [1]). We can do
better!

As a first step it made sense in my head that we should use media
queries for devices which support them to adapt the desktop site so it
is optimised for at least modern mobile users which would be a step in
the right direction.

I made a couple of changes [2,3] on the www.wikipedia.org_template
(temp version) to support this. Firstly I moved inline styles into css
rules and then I added device specific css rules that use media
queries. This results in a mobile optimised homepage [4] for any
devices which have a max screen width of 480px (which was the width
that I judged problems with the desktop layout began to occur).

I would appreciate thoughts on whether this is workable and what would
need to happen to move these changes over to the homepage. The current
desktop site stays exactly the same and I'm sure there are further
optimisations that can be made to make this adapted version prettier
(please do volunteer those if you believe you can improve it even more
so!).

Going forward when device detection is built into the mediawiki core
it would be great to support other mobile devices which do not have
media query support by serving these additional styles without the
media query wrapper.

Thank you for your interest and help in making Wikipedia more usable
to our growing mobile community!
Jon

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30389
[2] 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Www.wikipedia.org_template%2Ftemp&diff=3764806&oldid=3754632
[3] 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Www.wikipedia.org_template%2Ftemp&diff=3764927&oldid=3764806
[4] http://bug-attachment.wikimedia.org/attachment.cgi?id=10619

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