New Book namespace created

Here's something I co-wrote for this week's issue of The Wikipedia Signpost. Again, this version has been slightly edited to be more understandable to non-wikipedians.

By notafish and Headbomb, 11 January 2010

On 28 December 2009, the Book namespace was deployed on the English Wikipedia, intended to host "books" produced by the collection extension. The idea was first proposed in March 2009, and again in December 2009. Shortly after a poll showed clear consensus, the namespace was implemented.

Books were previously hosted in the Wikipedia namespace (Wikipedia:Books/Title) and have since been moved to Book:Title. The namespace is recognized by Wikipedia's magic words, enabling templates to take full advantage of it. The WPBannerMeta template, which is used by several WikiProjects to keep track of articles, has already been updated to recognize the book namespace, and will automatically assess these pages as Book-Class. (See previous article.)

Since the launch of the collection extension about a year ago, more than 550 books have been created. They are typically used by wikiprojects to present selections of their best articles (Book:Anime and Manga Recognised Articles), exhaustive selections of articles on a topic (Book:Hydrogen), or exhaustive biographies (Book:Frédéric Chopin). These can then be downloaded electronically or ordered as printed books. Editors interested in books can join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, and ask their own wikiproject(s) to support the book-class.

References

• notafish, Headbomb (11 January 2010). "New Book namespace created", The Wikipedia Signpost, 6 (2). Accessed 2010-01-11.