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 Wikipedia: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

Hadronic Matter An overview

An example of a book cover, taken from Book:Hadronic Matter

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 Wikipedia:Books, Help:Books, and WikiProject Wikipedia-Books.

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22 March 2010

Wikipedia-Books

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I don't think that the Wikipedia books must be deleted, because they are useful to some users. Thank you, --Patriot8790 (talk) 06:50, 28 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Being an employee of PediaPress, I'm sure Headbomb likes Wikipedia-Books too. But like other pages, some of them aren't appropriate for Wikipedia and should be deleted. Some of them aren't even proper Wikipedia-Books, so there should be some deletion process for books. Previously they would go Miscellany for deletion; now there's PROD-like process that can take care of the non-controversial stuff. Reach Out to the Truth 01:29, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I totally agree with Patriot8790 (talk): users that have already made a habit of deleting tons of books are not serving the Wikipedia users or the community at large, because they have mostly a destructive, rather than any constructive role. There should be a strict upper limit, like 6 to 8, of the number of books proposed for deletion by any user so that no Wikipedia user "makes a career" out of erasing book creators' efforts that are useful to the community at large; this is totally counter-productive to the entire Wikipedia books projects. Bci2 10:13, 8 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think you misunderstand what this is about. BPROD is for the non-controversial deletion of books. 99%+ of the time, this means books which were created as tests (such as books containing no articles, books which makes no sense, etc...). These books are in theory deletable under WP:CSD#G2, but BPRODs give a one week buffer period so people have the possibility to object, and it also allows users to request undeletion if they weren't around when the book was proposed for deletion.

Likewise restricting users to a certain limit of BPROD is process creep. There's no actual problem with letting people tag 100+ books at a time. I've proposed over 600 books for deletion in the last two weeks (and I'll proposed hundreds more in the next one), and everything went just fine. This is simple cleanup, not "erasing the efforts of book-creators". If there's one guy on Wikipedia who's got the interests of book creators at heart, I certainly hope it's me. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 22:02, 8 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]