Last modified: 2014-09-23 20:48:38 UTC
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:History/Barack_Obama> works, but <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:History/Barack_Obama> fails: --- This page is not available on desktop. Please click the mobile view link at the bottom of the page. --- I hit this issue earlier today when trying to switch back to the desktop site by URL munging. This is a pretty bad user experience. If the "Special:History" name(space) is going to be reserved by the MobileFrontend extension, it probably ought to match user expectations on desktop by either loading the page history or redirecting to ?action=history. This is related to bug 11456.
Prioritization and scheduling of this bug is tracked on Trello card https://trello.com/c/pDysJs3s
Agreed. There is nothing stopping us from enabling it there and to enable it there is really trivial. When we have done this in the past we have been asked not to e.g. Special:Uploads (although Special:Nearby we then were asked to enable it - so I guess we can't always be right :-)). So MZ... I'm happy to enable this on desktop if you can show the community wants this. I will do it personally if you can come back with that information. To dispel a few myths though.. * The desktop link does link to the desktop history page e.g. titte=Barack_Obama&action=history&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop (although there is a bug in production in the redirector that means this won't be fully working till Thursday's deployment) - see http://en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:History/Forty-seven_Ronin for a working example - so there is no bad user experience here. * We have not reserved the Special:History namespace. In fact it was written at a time when we expected the history page was going to be turned into a special page. I think this change got to desktop got reverted? It only shows up as no one has implemented this on desktop. If core ever decides to implement this it will just work, Special:History will just be enabled on the mobile view.
I tried enabling it and it works fine just doesn't completely fit in with the Vector style. Probably will need a bit of design love before doing this. It would be great to use this to transform the desktop experience.
(In reply to Jon from comment #3) > Probably will need a bit of design love before doing this. Is that on somebody's todo list?
Not to my knowledge. A while back action=history was ported to redirect to Special:History and that change got reverted so I'm also a bit concerned about interfering with any efforts there. Bug 41836 talks about porting action=info to special page, Andre do you know of similar bugs for history?
