No one is asking for en.m.wikipedia.org. Someone on their phone asks for en.wikipedia.org (or more likely clicks a link to it from Google or elsewhere), gets redirected to en.m.wikipedia.org (instead of serving a mobile or responsive page directly on en.wikipedia.org), and then copies the resulting link to their friend who didn't ask for any of this. And worse yet, in most cases neither party even notices the `.m.` much less knows what it means or to remove it to get a "normal" Wikipedia.
I think you vastly overestimate the number of people typing `en.m.wikipedia.org` in. I'm pretty sure the number of people doing that is negligible, in fact.
And by the way, I wouldn't care about the existence of en.m.wikipedia.org nearly as much if it actually were opt-in. Because then it would be a lot more rare. The problem is that Wikipedia opts you into it implicitly if you are on mobile. Which means that if anyone in a chain of clicking on and then sharing a link is on mobile... suddenly everyone sees the mobile link and needs to do much more work than "click on a link" to opt OUT of it.
Well over 50% of the Wikipedia links I see these days are mobile links and 0% of the time am I clicking on them from a mobile device.
You need to take a step back. The end user is not asking for https whatever, they’re asking to see the same Wikipedia page their friend saw, adapted to their screen. Whatever gets in the way of that is bad UX
I guess the best way to do it would be to redirect the user to the correct domain based on agent, if they haven’t already chosen an override?
The best way to do it would be to not redirect at all but instead simply serve the different layout at the same URL using the same criteria they already use to redirect. (Or, of course, they could use something like CSS media queries for a responsive design with a single set of code!)
There's no reason for them to have a different URL for the mobile views (it should be a cookie or session state if the user explicitly overrides, otherwise automatic) and there IS a reason that Wikipedia is basically the only major site still in existence that doesn't serve up their mobile-designed view on the same URL. Yes, `m.` was a huge trend back in the days of "mobile" meaning "a crappy J2ME browser", but it's not anymore and for damn good reason!
> The end user is not asking for https whatever, they’re asking to see the same Wikipedia page their friend saw, adapted to their screen.
This is already the behavior of Wikipedia mobile pages.
> I guess the best way to do it would be to redirect the user to the correct domain based on agent, if they haven’t already chosen an override?
This, on the other hand, is already the behavior of Wikipedia's normal pages.
The mobile page will give you what you asked for, and the normal page will give you what it thinks you probably want. These are both approaches that you could argue for.
But I can't understand why everyone is trying to argue that the give-you-what-you-want approach is actually, if you think about it hard enough, the give-you-what-you-asked-for approach.
Yes. "Always the same no matter what" is what was described. If your friend is looking at a mobile wikipedia page, and sends you the URL for that page, then you too will see the same mobile wikipedia page when you follow the link. That's the whole concept of being "the same".
No, what was described was specifically "the same Wikipedia page their friend saw, adapted to their screen". "The same Wikipedia page their friend saw" meaning the same contents - the same rendered Wikitext - they don't care about getting the same experience, they want the same data. "adapted to their screen" meaning NOT seeing the mobile experience on a desktop!
I can only assume you are trolling because you are assuming a meaning that is the complete antithesis of what namdnay explicitly said (and what everyone else in this dead thread has been telling you). Therefore I will go ahead and say farewell and good luck.
There is no way to interpret requesting a dedicated mobile URL other than as specifically asking for the mobile version of the page.
Or are you saying Wikipedia should be aware that you got the link from your obnoxious friend? HTTP doesn't really allow for that.