Mobile/Release history

This details mobile release history on mobile and the current features we are working on.

Mobile Web
The mobile web version of Wikipedia makes use of three modes - alpha, beta and stable. Stable mode is the default experience for all users, however users can opt into other modes where they get additional features at the expensive of slightly less stability. Beta is generally bug free or close to bug free and is where we stage features and tweak them to perfection before releasing them to the wild. Our experimental (alpha) mode is as it suggests - very experimental. There are lots more features here and a higher probability of bugs. Developers are encouraged to submit new feature ideas for alpha testing as long as there is no other feature which tries to solve the same problem. Alpha features will be assessed based on user feedback as well as through the use of EventLogging and the best ones will be moved to beta.

The purpose of this page is to explain what features you can expect in both alpha and beta modes, how long these experiments/projects have been running and who has been working on the code.

Beta
Features shortlisted for stable N/A

Currently sitting in beta
 * Visual Editor
 * Getting Started
 * Home page suggested edits
 * Test condition for left edit guider
 * Revision / Diff improvements:
 * Next and previous buttons on diff pages. First introduced by User:jdlrobson 28th May 2013.
 * A view source button when viewing old revisions (see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54484)
 * Nearby: Navigate here on Nearby (begun in June 2013 by User:Jdlrobson)
 * Nearby Article preview on nearby (begun in May 2013 by User:jdlrobson)
 * Image lightboxes (mobile media viewer) - clicking an image will open it up in a full screen lightbox. Introduced by Jgonera in September 2013
 * Talk page overlay (begun in June 2013 by User:Jdlrobson)
 * Add topics
 * Nearby pages to this page - an extension of Special:Nearby which takes article geo data and shows other articles near it with you actually not needing to be near it. Introduced in July 2013 by Jdlrobson [Promoted in Grasshopper]
 * Red links are enabled. (Cannot be pushed to stable until we investigate user behavior - do people get reverted? Do they need handholding etc?)
 * Microtap - more responsive clicking to elements - introduced by JGonera in August 2013

Alpha

 * Talk
 * bubble has the number of open talk topics in it
 * ability to reply to talk topics.
 * New features
 * Categories - introduced in August 2013 as volunteer patch by Linas Valiukas
 * UX improvements
 * Ajax page loading - added 23rd October 2012. First introduced by User:jdlrobson with input from User:jgonera
 * Language overlay improvements
 * [Candidate for promotion/deletion] Favorite languages. Prioritize the list of languages with your most widely used ones first. First introduced by User:jdlrobson. [does this currently work?]
 * Toggling
 * Ability to open all sections by default via Special:MobileOptions

Scrapped Experiments
Some experiments don't make it to stable. The following features were dropped from alpha:

[Removing from Alpha in I5c731661ea059f61a4cb6cb5ce0409e37115f68b] No main page special casing - in stable main pages are special cased. We'd rather they weren't. This provides an environment with additional styles which reduces the need.

Mobile Web Features
Here is a summary of what stable users get.