 | This page in a nutshell: An RfC found consensus to deprecate the Book namespace and delete all books therein, with undeletion available on request. See "How do I get a book undeleted?" below for instructions. |
On 15 May 2021, an RfC was opened that proposed deprecating the Book namespace, and gave various options for what to do with the content in the namespace should consensus be found for deprecation.
The deprecation portion of the RfC was subsequently closed on 24 May 2021 with consensus being found to deprecate.
Subsequently, the "options for action" portion was closed on 18 June 2021, with consensus being found to delete books within the namespace so long as undeletion was possible on request. Consensus was separately found for other options that were smaller in scope, such as preventing the namespace being indexed by search engines, but the deletion option superseded these.
Owing to technical restrictions, content cannot be undeleted from namespaces that do not exist (they would be located at Special:Badtitle/NS108:<book_name>, which cannot be accessed directly). Therefore, in order to ensure that content is retrievable as per the RfC finding, all books were moved to subpages of Wikipedia:Books/archive by a bot.
The book namespace was removed from the English Wikipedia, on 13 July 2021.
On 3 August 2021, all books had been deleted.