Many Ways to Fork Content

I speak often of forking content. One question has been how that specifically happens. Since this site has many forked pages I answered how I had forked them.

Our current technique involve two steps, introduction and integration, each with alternatives making for many variations. I star ★ the alternatives I demonstrated.

As we navigate from an origin we own we are introduced to new sites as our neighborhood grows.

How To Wiki documentation is wired into most wikis and has links to other interesting sites.

Site About Sites mentioned in How to Wiki has been organized so as to add a brief site description for many more sites to the searchable neighborhood.

We can edit the browser's location bar to include the site name and page name in the lineup. This works for those who understand how wiki assembles urls.

It is common to have many browser tabs open on different federated wiki sites. One introduces a page from one tab to the site of another tab by dragging the page's flag into the second tab. This is easier to understand if the tabs are open in different windows but that isn't always necessary.

Drag a flag from one site onto a Factory item in the second site. This creates a Reference that leads from one wiki to the other. Follow it to the one page or search for other pages now in your neighborhood.

Drag a flag from one site into the lineup of a second site (anywhere but a Factory). This adds the page to the lineup and all other pages from the site to the neighborhood. ★

Any edit to a remote page implicitly forks it to the origin. Dragging an item from a remote page is an edit that will (perhaps unexpectedly) fork the page.

Dragging an item from a revision of a remote page does not fork the remote page. This is a quirk that is sometimes used to avoid the implicit fork.

Clicking the fork button will fork the page to the origin without modification.

Clicking a link that names the page will lead to an offer that includes visiting and forking the remote page. This technique shows the most available alternatives for the new page, including creating a blank one. ★

Dragging journals between pages provides a mechanism for merging content, including content from remote pages.

The details of these mechanisms are under the control of each specific server and the javascript it offers for editing. The remote sites need only deliver pages when asked. New mechanisms, especially mechanisms tuned for use on small devices, can be expected.