Help:Mobile access

This help page is a how-to guide.

It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus.

Shortcut

WP:MOBILE

Readers' FAQ

About Wikipedia Administration FAQs Assessing article quality Authority control Books Categories Censorship Copyright Disambiguation Images and multimedia ISBN Microformats Mobile access Offline access Navigation Other languages Page names Portals Searching Student help
Researching with Wikipedia Citing Wikipedia
Readers' glossary Readers' index Reader's guide to Wikipedia
v t e

It is possible to access and edit Wikipedia on multiple types of device, such as desktop computers, tablets and smartphones, through several different methods, including options for older devices, modern apps for various platforms and options to view content while offline. This is intended for those who want to read and edit on the go.

The official mobile version of English Wikipedia is located at en.m.wikipedia.org, with the official desktop version of English Wikipedia located at en.wikipedia.org. A toggle switch between mobile and desktop view is available at the bottom of every page.

Official applications can be found at:

Mobile version of Help:Mobile access

Desktop version of Help:Mobile access

Official mobile version

The mobile version of Wikipedia is located at https://en.m.wikipedia.org.

Users of supported mobile devices are automatically redirected to the official mobile version of Wikipedia (this can be overridden by clicking the desktop-view button at the bottom of the page, after which the device will no longer be automatically redirected to the mobile site).

Supported: iOS, Android, Opera Mini.

Tablets

Tablets are served a slightly modified version of the mobile site, which makes use of the larger screen size to, e.g., show a table of contents and display all article sections open by default.

Interface options

This mobile version is available for all languages of Wikipedia. It is actively developed, supported and translated. It supports editing; visit any article and you'll see a pencil icon on every section. Anyone, including those who are not logged in, can use the mobile editor. You can also check your watchlist on mobile, add/remove articles from it, and more. If you don't want to use the mobile version, you can find options at the bottom of every page to switch to the desktop version.

Older phones

Legacy browsers

Legacy mobile browsers that were fairly advanced during their time, such as NetFront (2.3), should be able to browse the Wikipedia Mobile version without too much effort. Depending on a phone's capabilities, it may be advisable to turn images and JavaScript off.

Opera Mini

Older featurephones' native browsers commonly have limited functionality and are outdated. If your phone is Java ME-capable, you might consider installing Opera Mini, a Java ME-based Internet browser for mobile phones. Some phones have Opera Mini built-in, and may only require setting the browser up for use. Opera Mini works by sending a request to Opera's servers, which return a compressed and stripped-down page to the phone. Depending on version, Opera Mini is often more functional and up-to-date than the native browser supplied with the phone. Opera Mini has a built-in Wikipedia search facility.

Opera Mini website — Various versions are on offer to match the capabilities of a particular phone.

Official mobile apps

Shortcut

H:MOBILEAPP

Android

Shortcut

WP:ANDROID

The Android app allows editing articles directly from the app. It has limited capability to show categories and talk pages. It is also available on F-Droid.

An Android app for Wikimedia Commons is also community maintained on GitHub. There is an Android app for Wiktionary, although it is no longer supported and has not been updated since August 2013.

iOS

Shortcut

WP:IPHONE

The iOS app also provides a read and write version of Wikipedia, similar to the mobile web version. It allows users to share an article via Facebook and other social websites. It also allows users to find geotagged articles near their current location. It does not allow users to see categories, nor to see the normal desktop version.

KaiOS

The official Wikipedia for KaiOS app provides a read-only version of Wikipedia. KaiOS is a web-based mobile operating system for modern smart feature phones. It is a successor of the discontinued Firefox OS and popular in many regions.

Get it on KaiStore

Third-party applications

iOS apps

Many iOS apps exist for browsing Wikipedia. Besides the mobile version of the site, the only app capable of editing Wikipedia is the official one.

Name	Price	Can edit?	Notes
Wikipanion	Free	No
Wikipanion Plus	$4.99	No
Minipedia – Offline Wiki	Free	No	Contains the 100,000 most read articles; multilanguage support: English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish
MiniWiki	Free	No	Allows browsing Wikipedia on the Apple Watch

Android apps

See all "Wikipedia" apps in the Google Play Store
- EveryWiki for Android
- Kiwix Offline viewer

Desktop access

The desktop version of English Wikipedia is located at en.wikipedia.org

If a browser is installed for general use, it can be used to access the general Wikipedia site, also for editing, depending on limitations of the browser. A toggle switch between mobile and desktop view is available at the bottom of every page. User styles and preferences can be adapted to customize and optimize user interfaces for mobile devices. For example, navigation popups may or may not be convenient on mobile devices.

Metro-style

Metro-style apps provides a read-only version of Wikipedia, similar to the mobile web version. The app when used in Windows RT is incapable of showing moving pictures.

Index of Windows 10 apps

Media

Media can be controlled with the keyboard. F toggles fullscreen, m toggles mute and both k and space toggle between playing and pausing the media.

The following mobile browsers can play video and audio files on Wikipedia:^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] Browsers not listed here are not supported at all.

Browser	Audio	Video / WebM
Safari 6.1-11	Yes	No
Safari 12+	Yes	Partial^{[media-notes 1]}
IE 9-11 (Windows 7/8/8.1/10)	Yes	installable
IE 10/11 (Windows RT)	Yes	No
Edge (Windows 10 PC/Tablet)	Yes	Yes
Edge (Windows 10 Mobile)	Yes	Yes
Opera mini (all versions)	Yes	No
Android browser 4.4	Yes	No
Android browser 5.6+	Yes	Yes
Opera mobile 15	Yes	No
Opera mobile 62	Yes	Partial
Chrome for Android 89+	Yes	Yes
Firefox for Android 86+	Yes	Yes
UC Browser for Android 12+	Yes	Yes
Samsung Internet 5+	Yes	Yes

^ Video playback is only supported with Javascript decoding, which can be a bit slow. Unfortunately Apple does not support native hardware based decoding of VP8 and/or VP9, the video codecs which MediaWiki software uses and supports.

Audio

A computer-generated audio (speech synthesis) version of all Wikipedia articles is provided by the Pediaphon service. It is usable on- and off-line with common MP3 players, PDAs, and with every phone via voice call. Pediaphon can be used as a location-based service.

Pediaphon

E-readers

Amazon Kindles have access to Wikipedia content via the Kindle software's built-in web browser. All content is shown in black-and-white (all colored images and graphs are converted); this is a limitation of the Kindle's display hardware. Animation support is also poor, and some rendering bugs exist, such as a tendency for random portions of reference lists to become invisible.

The Wiki-as-Ebook project provides massive encyclopaedias for E-Book-readers created from a large set of Wikipedia articles (commercial; 2013). Colored images are converted to grayscale.

Offline access

Offline access to English Wikipedia can be done in many ways.

The OpenZIM format uses the free Kiwix software available in the Microsoft Store, on Google Play and Apple's iOS App Store to view Wikipedia offline. A series of "customized apps" have also been released, of which Medical Wikipedia and PhET simulations are the two largest.

Or

The Version 1.0 Editorial Team works on publishing sets of Wikipedia articles in print, CD, DVD, or some combination thereof. In 2008, SOS Children published a Wikipedia CD Selection for schools, which may be viewed at schools-wikipedia.org, and is available for free download via the charity's website.

Or

Try one of the other external applications listed below which allow you to download a copy of Wikipedia's database and then view, search, and browse it offline.

XOWA: (instructions)
aarddict: (instructions)
BzReader (for Windows): (instructions)
WikiTaxi (for Windows): (instructions)

Raw data dump

English Wikipedia dumps in SQL and XML: dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/ and the Internet Archive. The database can be downloaded here, but you will need to set up a web server, PHP, MySQL and our wiki software, MediaWiki, to make use of it.

Or

Download here the data dump using a BitTorrent client.

Engineering and support

The mobile version is based on the MobileFrontend extension of the MediaWiki software, and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation's Reading Web team.

Learn more about:

The projects we are currently working on
- Advanced mobile contributions
Our software component responsibilities
The mobile web interface

Support:

Email, X (formerly Twitter), Mobile-l mailing list, IRC: #wikimedia-mobile ^connect
Report a new bug or view the list of known bugs

References

^ mw:Extension:TimedMediaHandler/ogv.js
^ ""webm" | Can I use... Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc". caniuse.com.
^ ""ogg" | Can I use... Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc". caniuse.com.
^ "Kaltura Player Supported Browsers / Devices | Kaltura Knowledge Center". knowledge.kaltura.com.

v t e Wikipedia technical help
Get personal technical help at the Teahouse, help desk, village pump (technical), talk pages or IRC.
General technical help	Browser notes Bypass cache Keyboard shortcuts Editing CharInsert Edit conflict Edit toolbar Reverting How to create a page IRC Tutorial Mobile access Multilingual support Page history Page information Page name Help Printing Software notices Editnotice Special Characters Entering User access levels VisualEditor Help
Special page-related	Special page help AllPages Edit filter Emailing users Logging in Reset passwords Logs Moving a page History merging Non-admin and admin-only page moves Notifications/Echo FAQ Page Curation Page import Pending changes Random pages Recent changes Related changes Searching Linksearch Tags User contributions Watchlist What links here
Wikitext	Wikitext Cheatsheet Columns Line-break handling Lists Magic words For beginners Conditional expressions Switch parser function Time function Redirects Sections and TOCs Tables Introduction Basics Advanced table formatting Collapsing Conditional tables Sortable tables Using colours
Links and diffs	Links Interlanguage Interwiki Permanent Diffs Simplest diff guide Simple diff and link guide Complete diff and link guide Colon trick Link color Pipe trick URLs
Media files: images, videos and sounds	Media help Files Creation and usage Moving files to Commons Images Introduction to images Picture tutorial Preparing images for upload Uploading images Options to hide an image Extended image syntax SVG help Gallery tag Graphics tutorials Basic bitmap image editing How to improve image quality Graphics Lab resources Sound file markup Visual file markup
Other graphics	Family trees Graphs and charts How to create Barcharts To scale charts Math formulas Math symbols Musical scores Musical symbols Timeline EasyTimeline syntax WikiHiero syntax
Templates and Lua modules	Templates Advanced template coding Template documentation Template index Template limits Template sandbox and test cases Citation templates Lua help Lua project Resources To do Substitution Purge Job queue Transclusion Labeled section Costs and benefits Guide to Scribbling
Data structure	Namespaces Main/Article Category Draft File File description page Help Portal Project/Wikipedia Talk Archiving Simple Template User User page design MediaWiki Bug reports and feature requests TimedMediaHandler extension Module Special
HTML and CSS	Cascading Style Sheets HTML in wikitext Catalogue of CSS classes Common.js and common.css User CSS for monospaced coding font Classes in microformats Markup validation Span tags Useful styles
Customisation and tools	Preferences Gadgets Skins Citation tools Cleaning up vandalism tools Customizing watchlists Hide pages IRC Scripts User scripts Guide List Techniques User style Tools Alternative browsing Browser tools Editing tools Navigation shortcuts Optimum tool set Wikimedia Cloud Services Beta Features at MediaWiki
Automated editing	AfC helper script AntiVandal AutoWikiBrowser Bots Creating history HotCat Huggle Navigation popups RedWarn Twinkle Ultraviolet WPCleaner Inactive igloo STiki
See also: Category:Wikipedia how-to Category:Wikipedia information pages Further navigation at: Help pages Administrators Accessibility Accounts Bots Referencing Citation metadata Templates User scripts

v t e Wikipedia help pages
*Visit the Teahouse* or the Help desk for an interactive Q & A forum. FAQs (?) Reference desks (?) Noticeboards (?) Cheatsheet (?) Directories (?)**
About Wikipedia (?)	Administration Purpose Principles Policies and guidelines What Wikipedia is not Disclaimer (parental advice) Making requests Who writes Wikipedia?
Help for readers (?)	FAQ Books Copyright Glossary Mobile access Navigation Other languages Searching Students Viewing media
Contributing to Wikipedia (?)	Advice for young editors Avoiding common mistakes Etiquette Simplified Manual of Style Simplified rule-set "Ignore all rules" "The rules are principles" Style-tips Tip of the day Your first article (article wizard)
Getting started (?)	Why create an account? Introductions by topic Graphics tutorials Picture tutorial IRC (live chat) tutorial VisualEditor user guide
Dos and don'ts (?)	Accessibility Biographies Biographies (living) Categorization Consensus Discussions Disambiguation Images Leads Links Lists References Tables Titles (of articles)
How-to pages and information pages (?)	Appealing blocks Article deletion Categories Citations/references Referencing for beginners Citation Style 1 Cite errors References and page numbers Convert Diff Editing Minor edit toolbar edit conflict Find sources Files Footnotes Image deletion Infoboxes Linking (link color) Logging in Merging Page name Renaming pages Redirect Passwords Email confirmation Reverting Simple vandalism cleanup Talk pages (archiving simple archiving) User contributions WP search protocol
Coding (?)	Wiki markup Barcharts Calculations Characters Columns Elevation Hidden text HTML Lists Magic words Music symbols Sections Sounds Tables Templates Transclusion URL Visual files
Directories (?)	Abbreviations Contents (Encyclopedia proper) Departments Editor's index Essays FAQs Glossary Guidelines Manual of Style Policies Tasks Tips Tools
Missing Manual Ask for help on your talk page (?)

Official mobile version

Interface options

Older phones

Legacy browsers

Opera Mini

Official mobile apps

Android

iOS

KaiOS

Third-party applications

iOS apps

Android apps

Desktop access

Metro-style

Media

Audio

E-readers

Offline access

Engineering and support

See also

References