Everything you wanted to know about forking. What is a fork? Why do you need to know? And why is it so beautiful?
In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but a split in the developer community, a form of schism.
A 'like' is a way of sharing attention with a new work and its author. We consider how federated wiki's 'fork' improves on the 'like' mechanism.
In Shirky's 2003 post "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", he intuits that one solution to having social software that scales is "soft-forking groups": groups with fuzzy edges, centered around individual relations.
Klint Finley has written about Ward Cunningham's work on a federated wiki, linking ideas around Fedwiki to Github, whose strapline is "Build software better, together". html 
Previously we have contemplated the need for complementary notice on fork. Here, I start to think through how such a mechanism might work. I draw inspiration from Webmention .
An author may be very interested for a range of reasons in who has forked there work, or they may not. Both scenarios are important and should be respected. Authors should be in control and not the software.
A fork action, would be the recording of the act of forking in such a way that that information could be used by other parites - such as to notify people.
Fork symmetry is the idea that when a person forks a page, both parties should be aware of the action. Currently only the person forking a page "knows" what they have done. The advantage of the fork/forked unification is that the neighborhood expands in a very generous way.
Privacy and Fork Spam
Fork Spam and Fork Privacy Federated Spam Any notification probably should be private, so does not automatically expand a neighbourhood but requires a concious decision.
The client could tell a remote server when it forks a page. However we don't want strangers to write on any site (they will find a way to spam). However, a complementary notice could be ignored, counted or recorded. All are useful options at various states of growth.
In conversations about comments and forks, happening participants have expressed frustration with not being able to tell who wrote what when. I put it this way: