It's actually very trivial to enable Minerva on desktop. Currently you can do so appending useskin=minerva e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt?useskin=minerva but we purposely hide it from the preferences. This is easy to rectify though if you wanted us to.
Although it does come with some caveats...
1) section toggling doesn't get enabled, as result there is no concept of a lead section, so 'this page has issues' captures every issue in the page (there may be repeats) 2) You cannot edit anything other than the lead section (linked to above) 3) Special:Watchlist renders as normal desktop version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist?useskin=minerva 5) Ugly preferences page rather than Special:MobileOptions (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? 4) Special:History unavailable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:History/Franklin_D._Roosevelt?useskin=... 5) Ugly preferences page rather than Special:MobileOptions (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Preferences&returnto=... - however this will render more nicely with the MediaWiki UI patch [1]) 6) No uploads link in left menu 7) Talk page link renders but takes you to the standard talk page 8) The footer is different
[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/150635
On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 4:30 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
"Wikipedia already looks great ... just add .m (on desktop)" https://news.layervault.com/stories/31897-wikipedia-already-looks-great--jus...
For those unfamiliar, this is a designer's equivalent to Hacker News. Interesting to see professional UX designers be less forgiving towards the WikiWand design, in addition to the warm fuzzies from the love for the mobile site.
This kind of feedback makes me wish you could set your desktop skin to use mobile (aka Minerva). Or may e have clicking the "mobile view" link set a cookie for my session to auto-redirect to mobile. Otherwise, it's hard to evaluate how the mobile view stands up over sustained use on desktop.
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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