Making MediaWiki Mobile Friendly

The purpose of this page is to identify known problems with MediaWiki pages (including Wikipedia) when displayed via the MobileFrontend extension and provide a method of resolution. As common inline styling problems are discovered they will be listed here with a suggested way of fixing them. Known pages that exhibit the problem will eventually be linked to from this page. Any help you can give fixing these problems would be much appreciated.

Two column layouts


Problem: Certain pages (mostly portals) have two column layouts which do not work on mobile

Cause: These tend to be caused by inline styles in one of the following forms

Resolution: Replace inline styles with generic two column layout classes (portal-column-left-wide, portal-column-left, portal-column-right, portal-column-right-narrow so stylesheets can feature rules to deal with these on smaller screens

Examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:Missouri&diff=prev&oldid=495624262

Pages effected: List of Problematic portal pages with two column layouts

Use of column-count


Problem: Certain pages have reference/note pages that appear squashed on mobile

Cause: These pages make use of the column-count css property.

Resolution: We should introduce a class in wikipedia:MediaWiki:Common.css that provides this column-count property rather than placing it in an inline style. We should then cleanup articles to use this class instead (e.g. column-count:4; is replaced by use of class .column-count-4 ).

Examples: N/A

Pages effected: List of Problematic pages with multi column lists