Research:Device types

People use various types of computing devices to interact with Wikimedia sites, and it can be useful to divide these devices into standard types in order to compare user behavior across these types.

One potential typology, based on the Microsoft technical writing style guide, is:

• computers, also known as PCs
  • desktops
  • laptops
• tablets
• phones
• wearables

There are various ways to actually distinguish these device types in practice, such as screen-size thresholds, user-agent matching, or using operating system as a proxy.

Screen size classification

MediaWiki uses a standard set of CSS screen-width breakpoints to distinguish between devices types. These are based on a great deal of practical experience and, in the absence of something clearly superior, are the preferred method for distinguishing device types.

Instrumentation code can access the screen width using the screen.width web API property.

Screen width (px)	Screen size category	Corresponding device type
<320	very-small	feature phones
320-719	small	smartphones
720-999	medium	tablets, some netbooks
≥1000	large	laptops and desktops

Access method

One frequent proxy for device type is the interface that a user is using to access Wikimedia content. This is usually called the "access method" and is included in many traffic-related datasets such as page views.

Existing access methods are:

• desktop: the standard MediaWiki web interface
• mobile web: the mobile web interface provided by the MobileFrontend extension.
• mobile app: Wikipedia's official Android app and iOS app. As of August 2022, page views from the Commons app are not tagged with this access method.

Note that the "desktop" access method does not necessarily mean the device is a computer and "mobile web" does not mean the device is a tablet or smartphone. Almost all tablets and smartphones are redirected to the mobile website based on their user-agent header (Varnish code which implements the redirection), but a user can alter their user-agent header or disable this redirection. Computer users who access a mobile URL are not redirected back to the mobile site and can also manually turn on redirection to the mobile site.