User:Firefly/booksdraft

On 15 May 2021, an RfC was opened that proposed deprecating the Book namespace, and gave various options for what to do with the content in the namespace should consensus be found for deprecation.

The deprecation portion of RfC was subsequently closed on 24 May 2021 with consensus being found to deprecate.

Subsequently, the "options for action" portion was closed on 18 June 2021, with consensus being found to delete books within the namespace so long as undeletion was possible on request. Consensus was separately found for other options that were smaller in scope, such as preventing the namespace being indexed by search engines, but the deletion option superseded these.

Eventually, the plan is to remove the book namespace from the English Wikipedia, as there is no point keeping an unused and deprecated namespace around - however owing to technical restrictions, content cannot be undeleted from namespaces that do not exist. Therefore, in order to ensure that content is retrievable as per the RfC finding, all books were moved to subpages of Wikipedia:Books/archive by a bot before deletion.

How do I get a book undeleted?

Go to Requests for Undeletion, and enter Wikipedia:Books/archive/<book_name> as the page to undelete - replacing <book_name> with the name of the book you want to restore.

An administrator will then restore the content to your userspace or appropriate location in the Wikipedia namespace such as a relevant WikiProject subpage.

Background and case for deprecation

The following was taken largely from the opening statement of the RfC linked above, with some copyedits and tense changes for clarity.

The Book namespace was introduced in 2009 as a way to download or print a collection of articles. To do this you use Special:Book to select a collection of articles you want in the book. divide them into chapters and choose some rendering settings. You can also give it a cover image, change the color of the book, choose rendering settings, and divide the articles into chapters.

After this was done you could either purchase a printed copy from PediaPress or download it in a wide variety of formats including PDF using the Offline Content Generator.

Eventually the Offline Content Generator became outdated and unmaintainable. Bugs and security issues could no longer be fixed so the Wikimedia Foundation turned off the book rendering service on all Wikimedia wikis in October 2017. Since then, Wikipedia books have only been available either in physical form from PediaPress or through MediaWiki2LaTeX (de:b:Benutzer:Dirk Huenniger/wb2pdf/manual). The issue with this is that we now require readers to visit a third party site to access our content and either purchase it or wait for a significant amount of time to get access to the book to render if MediaWiki2LaTeX even works properly for you. A large proportion of our books are too long to render and a good chunk of the rest have things like navboxes breaking the renderer and even if it in theory should work I've had times were it randomly stop or I can't download the book for unexplained reasons. If you want to do it locally (which I've heard works significantly better) you will have to do it on Linux or set up a virtual machine. After investing a few hours trying to do this I gave up so I haven't tested that personally. If you want a PDF of an article I would instead suggest using the "Download as PDF" option in the side bar which can reliably give you a PDF version in seconds.

At the time of the deprecation RfC, the namespace had pageviews on the order of a popular portal like Portal:South Africa. This is spread out over a bit over 6000 pages. During a normal month without significant editor activity most books didn't get a single view and just 1.5% of books got any daily pageviews. The most popular one Book:Fundamental Data Structures got just 15.

There have been several previous initiatives to hide books from readers, the biggest three being 2019 removal of book creator from side bar and suppression of many links, 2021 removal of remaining links and 2021 deletion of some book related templates. The latter two were basically unanimous decisions.

Books are still considered a community facing namespace and are on help pages often referred to as "community books" and are supposedly being community maintained. They are indexed by search engines. You can create books in the book namespace using Special:Book, but they can also be created in userspace as Category:User namespace book pages. The namespace is listed as unused at WP:Namespace.

PediaPress links to a few of our books at the Catalog, which may or may not be possible to retain if the books are deleted on Wikipedia. It would continue to be possible to use PediaPress as long as Special:Book isn't removed. Either by not saving the book on wiki and saving it at PediaPress or by saving it user space.