Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-22/Wikipedia-Books

Extension of proposed deletion process
After about two weeks of discussion, the proposed deletion process was extended to cover Wikipedia-Books yesterday. (Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be rendered in various electronic formats, or ordered in print. See our previous article for more details.) This extension of the process was deemed necessary to prevent unnecessary burden on the miscellany for deletion process with the non-controversial deletion of books. The process, detailed at Proposed deletion (books) (shortcut WP:BPROD or WP:BOOK-PROD), was extended to cover books in order to cleanup several test books, or books created by users who conflated Wikipedia-Books with WikiBooks. An estimate places the number of affected books around 1150, which corresponds to a rate of ~3 deletable books per day since the book creator was launched.

The proposed deletion process for books functions exactly as the regular proposed deletion process, but comes with its own set of templates and categories, as well as its own page to give guidance specific to the proposed deletion of books.

It was argued that editors on the receiving end of a PROD should not be faced with details on the deletion of books, while editors on the receiving end of a BPROD should not be faced with details on the deletion of articles. After approximately two weeks, the extension of the proposed deletion process to books gained unanimous support, although there was/is some disagreement about whether there should be one page for both article and book proposed deletions, or one page for each.

A first wave of approximately 120 proposed deletion of books were made yesterday to "field test" the new process and its templates. The other books will be proposed for deletion after the results of this first wave of deletion is known. All books proposed for deletion can be found in Category:All books proposed for deletion.

Cleanup effort
In related news, WikiProject Wikipedia-Books is looking for help in cleaning up books. To help clean up books, simply go to Category:Wikipedia books (community books with errors), which contains the talk page of all books in need of cleanup. WildBot places detailed reports about the problems found in these books on these pages, as well as instructions on how to fix them. The category is divided into several subcategories to help prioritize cleanup by the severity of problems (duplicates, disambiguation pages, and redirects are particularly problematic).

The saved book template was also recently expanded to give an HTML preview of the default covers of printed books (see Book:Hadronic Matter for an example). A default cover image for the book can now be specified, as well as the color of the cover. More details can be found in the template documentation.

For more about Wikipedia-Books, see Books, Help:Books, and WikiProject Wikipedia-Books.