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

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.

Random proposal ►◄ Larger suggestions The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

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

Support Izno (talk) 00:17, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Shizhao (talk) 04:09, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support 𝑇𝑚𝑣 (𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑘) 07:39, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Hemantha (talk) 16:06, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Aca (talk) 16:13, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support —— Eric Liu_（Talk） 18:27, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Jklamo (talk) 19:24, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Douglasfugazi (talk) 21:23, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Gusfriend (talk) 00:06, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support A1 (talk) 09:00, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Titore (talk) 19:20, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Maro mich (talk) 22:00, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Libcub (talk) 01:17, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support daSupremo 04:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support JAn Dudík (talk) 21:42, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support KingAntenor (talk) 07:19, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support —MarcoAurelio (talk) 16:00, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support YBG (talk) 07:44, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support WikiAviator (talk) 16:07, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Betseg (talk) 08:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Gonnym (talk) 22:00, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Thingofme (talk) 14:00, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Lectrician1 (talk) 05:26, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Uanfala (talk) 22:45, 9 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Glerium (talk) 00:00, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support β₁₆ - (talk) 10:49, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Great idea, but might be impossible to implement. TheFrog001 (talk) 14:59, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Marcok (talk) 13:08, 11 February 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]