Community Wishlist/Wishes/Display of tables on mobile – when tapping on a table button rotate the screen for a fullscreen view/en
Description
Currently tables are highly unusable on mobile (web and app). Depending on the width of the table, most tables are cut off on the right on mobile and other small screens. They are generally hard to read/use on mobile.
A large and growing share of readers access Wikipedia articles using mobile phones. This is why good support for mobile phones is very important. Some websites go so far as to design with an increasingly popular "mobile first" approach that ensures that the display on mobile is at least as good as the desktop one.
Tables are important content of Wikipedia, featured in many articles and often displaying very useful, well/better-structured content that is sometimes making up nearly all of a list article's content and often of high interest to the readers of the article.
As a solution to this problem I suggest the following responsive web design:
- When the reader taps on a table (or a button displayed in it on mobile) rotate the screen and show the table in fullscreen.
- Don't show any other content of the article except eventually preceding or succeeding text that is directly referring to the table / descriptive of the table (this could be done via templates or by automatically including the first paragraph before the table). The tap could be anywhere on the table but maybe there should be a small image/button/tooltip that indicates that the table has to be tapped to be viewed better.
- When the table is displayed in rotated-screen-fullscreen show a large horizontal scrollbar at the bottom if some columns are still cut off. One could swipe left and right to see the full table. If no scrollbar is displayed to indicate that columns are cut off and that scrolling is possible there should be some other small icon/image, like a small arrow, to indicate this.
- Probably there should be a small image/button/tooltip that can be tapped for the fullscreen to be exited again.
There are multiple further cases of the mobile view getting neglected. These include hiding of categories on Wikimedia Commons, that tables are not sortable in the Wikipedia app and that the phabricator issue for this wish has been closed despite it not being a "duplicate" of the other issue which is not about a fullscreen view of tables at all but about "some elements extend beyond the content area and overlap sticky page tools".
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
Feature request
Related projects
Wikipedia
Affected users
Wikipedia readers using smartphones (mobile site & app)
Phabricator tasks
Other details
- Created: 10:55, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
- Last updated: 01:41, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
- Author: Prototyperspective (talk)