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Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Larger suggestions/Page merge and fork

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Page merge and fork

  • 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.
  • Who would benefit: editors
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: T113004
  • Proposer: Abiyoyo (talk) 23:44, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • This is probably too large for the team. --Izno (talk) 05:09, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • 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]
    I don't think there are actually copyright concerns :) Just interface clarity concerns. –SJ talk  23:56, 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]. –SJ talk  23:56, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting