User:Trialpears/book rfc draft

Should the book namespace be deprecated and if so what should deprecation include?

This RfC will involve several different but related proposals. First of all I will give some history on the book namespace since many editors are likely to be aware of the namespace. I will also explain the current status and link to some previous discussions (not required reading by any means). Then I will outline a few possible actions each in their own section. When the RfC is closed the consensus for each proposal will be evaluated and hopefully there will be a consensus on how to deal with this zombie namespace.

History
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Eventually the Offline Content Generator became outdated and unmaintainable.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.

Currently the namespace has total 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 don't get a single view and just 1.5% of books get a pageview a day. The most popular one Book:Fundamental Data Structures gets just 15. It's also worth noting that these figures are significantly inflated by my and others recent maintenance work which has resulted in thousands of these views.

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:Wikipedia books (user books). 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.

The question now is how should we handle books in the future. This could include alternatives from keeping the status quo since it's barely seen by anyone to complete deletion of the namespace including all books within it.

Formally deprecate the book namespace
This would include changing the language used at pages such as Books, Help:Books and Saved book. Books in the book namespace would no longer be described as community maintained.


 * Support This at a minimum should be done. The namespace does not enjoy community maintenance and we should make that clear. Calling it deprecated will make it clear for anyone that books aren't really supported.

Noindex the book namespace to hide it from search engines
This would occur by changing the MediaWiki configurations and prevent Wikipedia Books from showing up in search results. Books would still be reachable with Wikipedia's internal search function.


 * Support If we are to hide the links internally we should also hide them from search engines for the same reasons. This content does not benefit readers and leaves room for publishing something in an indexed namespace without supervision. This could possibly be abused by spammers or COI editors.

Remove the option to save in the book namespace from the book creator
This would be implemented by changing a simple MediaWiki configuration setting as documented at mw:Extension:Collection. The book namespace would still be editable and it would be possible to move books from user space there or manually create a book using wiki text and then use the book creator.


 * Support This would be a great way to heavily discourage creation of new community maintained books while not impacting creation of user books or editing of existing books.

Drop support for book class from WikiProject assessment
This would involve emptying and deleting the categories at Category:Book-Class articles and editing the associated templates to not support the book namespace.


 * Support At this point these don't serve a purpose and has already been marked historical.

Delete all books within the book namespace
WP:REFUNDs to user space would be possible. If all books are deleted the namespace should be uninstalled if deemed appropriate by the developers. This would remove it from lists of namespaces in places like Special:Search and Special:RecentChanges and allow pages like Book – A Novel to be located at the correct title. Special:Book will continue working like normal and saving books in user space is still possible. PediaPress would continue to work except for possibly the catalog depending on their implementation.


 * Neutral It would be nice to never have to worry about the namespace again and to remove the possibility of vandalism staying for months or the namespace containing a safe harbor for unsuitable pages. There is however some non-zero value from some of these pages for a small number of users. Since the previous link hiding combined with proposals here (mostly noindexing) would prevent people from accidentally coming to the namespace I believe it's fine to leave it like this. While we would still have a small amount of vandalism going uncaught for months, vandalism on a page with just a handful of views isn't that bad.