This proposal is a larger suggestion that is out of scope for the Community Tech team. Participants are welcome to vote on it, but please note that regardless of popularity, there is no guarantee this proposal will be implemented. Supporting the idea helps communicate its urgency to the broader movement.
Problem: MediaWiki doesn't allow page merge and fork. Editors have to copy-paste content manually, edit history is lost. Edit history can be merged via deleting, but it leads to unreadable mess.
Proposed solution: Extension to enable merge and fork features like a version control system.
Most likely, but I'll share my thoughts anyway: it seemingly wouldn't be too hard to have a Special:ForkPage for instance that simply copies the revisions to a new page. However they would of course be new revision IDs, and that brings up the question of what to do about timestamps. Do we use the original timestamps? That seems weird because those edits to the new page weren't actually made at the same times as the original edits. Finally, this feature could be abused. How bad does it make me look if you forked edits I made and put them under some inappropriate title? Food for thought.
Judging by the size of phab:T113004, I'm definitely going to say this is out of scope for us, but I will move it to our Larger suggestions category so the idea doesn't get suppressed in the archives. Best, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 23:27, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Forking involves some copyright concerns. Allowing page history to be a DAG instead of strictly linear seems not super hard in terms of backend implementation, but how do you display merges and forks to the user? It would be a massive project (although potentially quite valuable to support offline editing and FlaggedRevs style functionality where contributions can be on a "side branch" until they get reviewed; of course there are many ways that could go wrong). Tgr (talk) 21:59, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Well, if you "continue" the page history in the forked page in some way, there are copyright issues to deal with. If you duplicate the page history, there aren't, but then there will be duplicated edits in user contributions, inflated edit counts etc. Tgr (talk) 02:35, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
A full merge/fork tool is hard. But an interface for the current process (single-edit fork or merge, appropriate defaults for the edit summary) seems possible. I don't think you need to copy any revisions at all, just provide an interface that makes it easy to see them all in one history page or to compare revisions across the different article titles [something already possible if you know both article-revision-IDs]. –SJtalk23:56, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Nice to have to create new sandboxes. Maybe as user gadget. This would help in respecting copyrights, since most of the time an user just copy-pasta the content without leaving any information in the destination subject entry (so no way to go back to the original permalink or to the original page or to the original history). Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 16:57, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Izno (talk) 00:17, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
04:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
