Wikipedia:Books - Wikipedia
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Former namespace and feature
This page is about Wikipedia books – books built from Wikipedia articles. You may be looking for
Books
Help:Books
WikiProject Wikipedia-Books
WikiProject Books
Wikipedia:Notability (books)
Print Wikipedia
Wikibooks
Bibliography of Wikipedia
or
User:Tompw/bookshelf
This page has been closed down by
community consensus
, and is retained only for
historical
reference.
If you wish to restart discussion on the status of this page, seek community input at a forum such as the
village pump
It was last substantively updated in May 2021.
The book rendering service was
deprecated
in 2021
See
the alternative options
. For details of how to restore a book after deletion, see:
Wikipedia:Books/archive
More details
On 24 May 2021, the Book namespace was
formally deprecated
On 18 June 2021, consensus was reached to
delete the book namespace and all pages within it
, although individual books will be
restored
upon request.
On 13 July 2021, the Book namespace was
uninstalled from the English Wikipedia
All books were moved to subpages of
Wikipedia:Books/archive
at the end of June where they remained for a month to allow users to keep books in userspace and allow for refunds after namespace deletion.
On 3 August 2021, all books were deleted.
Wikipedia Book
(or a
Wikipedia Reading list
) is a book formed wholly or partially from an organized collection of
Wikipedia
articles
. Their list forms (generally created using the Book Creator tool) are often nowadays hosted in the
User namespace
in the form of a list of Wikipedia article tiles, some lists may also include for reading only specific sections of the article (generally included as an anchor link). There are third party services for rendering electronically in
PDF
format, or ordering as a printed book. The book is compiled afresh each time it is retrieved by the service, so that a new upload will always reflect the latest versions of the articles. There are currently many Wikipedia Books that are available on book sellers such as
Amazon.com
What alternatives are there?
Main page:
Help:Books/Printed books
Further information:
Help:Mobile access § Offline access
You can still
create and edit a book design
using the
book creator
and upload it to an external rendering service:
MediaWiki2LaTeX
provides a softcopy PDF service. Uniquely, it remains under active support and may be used online or installed locally. Be aware the computational resources of the server are limited. (Free service)
Pedia Press
offer final tidying and ordering of
print-on-demand
bound copies in (approximately)
A5
format. (Pay service)
Or
For help with downloading a single Wikipedia page as a PDF, see
Help:Download as PDF
. (Free service)
The
Wiki-as-Ebook
project provides encyclopedias for E-Book-readers created from a large set of Wikipedia articles. (Pay service)
Restore a deleted book
For details of how to restore a book after deletion, see:
Wikipedia:Books/archive
Historical page content
Overview
Each book generally has its own Wikipedia page, which contains a Contents list of the articles included in it together with formatting metadata such as Chapter headings. You can create a book as a
sub-page
in your own user space. The
Book Creator tool
can automate much of the book creation work, although experienced editors can also code up the book by hand.
Once completed, a book created by the Book Creator tool can be uploaded to the independent company
PediaPress
, where
print-on-demand
copies can be ordered. Such books may also be retrieved by other independent publishing tools such as
MediaWiki2LaTeX
. It used to be possible to build an e-book on Wikipedia for immediate download, but this service is no longer available.
For information and help on Wikipedia books created by the Book Creator tool, see
Help:Books
(general tips) and
WikiProject Wikipedia-Books
(questions and assistance).
Searching for books
You can look for books either by browsing the book categories or by searching for a title or topic.
Book categories
Wikipedia books are automatically categorised by location.
Category:User namespace book pages
lists all current user books maintained on user pages.
Search tool
The following code:
{{#tag:inputbox|
type=fulltext
prefix=Book:
width=40
break=no
searchbuttonlabel=Search
}}
creates a search box which will return a list of book titles.
The Bookshelf
The Bookshelf is a simple tool which combines the above options with a few statistics, enabling you to browse, search and view the Wikipedia Books created to date. You can place a copy anywhere by clicking the Edit tab above and copy-pasting the code from this page.
Bookshelf
Browse the book categories:
51,863 user-maintained books
Search for books:
Featured and good topics
Featured topics
and
Good topics
are collections of some of Wikipedia's best articles.
Some topics may have a dedicated book linked in the upper-left corners of the topic boxes.
History
2009: Rollout of the Book Creator Tool
The Wikipedia Book Creator Tool was first rolled out in 2009. It comprised two main parts:
The
Book Creator
user interface, for designing the book and for selecting an electronic format to render an individual copy as an e-book.
The
Offline Content Generator
(OCG) back-end service, which rendered the book in the chosen format and made it available for download.
But Wikipedia does not print books or handle ordering, as that costs money. An agreement was reached with
PediaPress
, who built their own renderer and publishing website, where a user could upload a Wikipedia book and either download a PDF softcopy for free or order
Print on demand
copies. PediaPress later withdrew their free softcopy service.
2017: On-wiki PDF withdrawal
Eventually the OCG service became outdated and unmaintainable. It became unreliable, while bugs and evolving security issues could no longer be fixed. The Wikimedia Foundation turned off the book rendering service on all Wikimedia wikis in
October 2017
. Since then, Wikipedia books have only been available from third-party providers.
2017 ff: Candidate replacements
A candidate replacement, called
Electron
, was based on the open-source Chrome HTML-to-PDF rendering engine but proved unsuitable for books, although it replaced the OCG for the PDF download of single articles. A second attempt, named
Proton
, also failed at book rendering but succeeded Electron for article rendering in 2019. During this period Dirk Hünniger independently wrote
MediaWiki2LaTeX
, which also compiles Wikipedia books in PDF format. However the
Wikimedia Foundation
were reluctant to adopt it because they could not support the Haskell programming language in which it is written. It has since been improved and offered by the
WikiMedia Foundation
(WMF) as an online service.
As of August 2020 the Book Creator design tool, MediaWiki2LaTeX softcopy rendering service and PediaPress print service remain available.
In April 2018
PediaPress
stepped forward to try and develop a viable replacement PDF book renderer called Collector, based on their previous experience with their own in-house renderer. The new renderer is planned to provide limited initial functionality, with incremental improvements over time. As of April 2019 an
alpha release of the core Collector service
has yet to become usable. It is being developed as a closed source project. The WMF are also unable to support closed-source code owned by third parties.
2019: Links hidden in articles and sidebar
In December 2019 English Wikipedia suppressed the rendering capability of
Template:Wikipedia books
(related =
Template:Book bar
Template:Books-inline
and removed the
Book Creator
from the sidebar after a community discussion about effectiveness.
As the Book Creator no longer generates copies of Wikipedia books, its primary working feature directs users to order printed Wikipedia books from
PediaPress
, a third-party company which has a longstanding agreement with the WMF. Editors in discussion valued the user experience of Wikipedia readers over the business prospects of PediaPress and felt that the template and sidebar link were no longer justifiable.
The namespace and its transclusions were retained in the hope that the WMF would come up with a solution. As a result of then-anticipated future solutions, template transclusions were not removed from articles. See
Suppress rendering of Template:Wikipedia books
for more information.
2021: Deletion of Book namespace
Shortcut
WP:BOOKSDEP
WP:BOOKSDEP
As a result of a
village pump proposal
, article and template transclusions to Wikipedia books are deprecated.
Due to
Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2021 April 7#Template:Wikipedia book
Template:Wikipedia books
and related templates were deleted in April 2021 and all of their transclusions were removed.
set of proposals
to look at the future of the Book namespace were started on May, 15 2021.
May 24, 2021:
Proposal 1
found that there was consensus to deprecate the entirety of the Book namespace.
Proposal 2
found that there was consensus to disable indexing of the book namespace to hide it from searches.
Proposal 3
found that there was consensus to stop the creation of books in the book namespace with the book creator.
June 18, 2021
Proposal 4
found that there was consensus to no longer support WikiProject assessment of the book namespace.
Proposal 5
found that there was consensus to delete all books within the book namespace, with the option to move them to userspace.
On July 13, 2021 the namespace was deleted through Phabricator ticket
T285766
External links
An
category on this subject in simple English
is also available
Media related to
Category:Wikipedia books
at Wikimedia Commons
Quotations related to
Category:Wikipedia books
at Wikiquote
Category:Wikipedia books
at Wikibooks
Category:Wikipedia books
travel guide from Wikivoyage
Learning materials related to
Category:Wikipedia books
at Wikiversity
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