Journal

Every fedwiki page carries a **journal** — a running record of how the page was made, edited, and where it has traveled across the federation. The journal is appended to, never overwritten, making it a permanent audit trail of the page's life.

## What the Journal Records

The journal lists each action that contributed to the page being what and where it is now. Every edit, addition, deletion, reordering, and fork is captured as a timestamped entry. Together these entries constitute a complete, replayable history.

When the journal is accurate it can be replayed to recreate every version of the page through its history. This is not just archival — it is the mechanism by which fedwiki reconstructs pages when you open them.

## Journal Entry Types

Each entry in the journal has a `type` field identifying what happened: - **`create`** — the page was first made; contains the initial story (often empty) - **`fork`** — the page was copied from another site; records the source domain - **`add`** — a new item was inserted into the story; records item content and position - **`edit`** — an existing item was changed; records the new content of that item - **`remove`** — an item was deleted from the story - **`move`** — the order of story items was rearranged Every entry also carries a `date` — a Unix timestamp in milliseconds — which is how fedwiki determines which copy of a page is newer.

## Ghost Pages

Clicking on any entry in the journal opens a **ghost page** — a read-only reconstruction of the page as it existed at that point in time. Ghost pages let you step through the full editing history, compare earlier versions, and understand how the content evolved. They are ephemeral: they appear in your lineup but cannot themselves be edited or forked.

## Forks in the Journal

When the journal contains `fork` entries identifying sites from which the page has been copied, those sites are added to the Neighborhood upon display. This is how fedwiki builds up a neighborhood organically — each fork entry is a pointer back to a community.

A fork entry records the source site's domain. When you open a page with several fork entries, fedwiki fetches pages from those sites and adds them to the neighborhood panel — silently expanding your view of the federation without any explicit configuration.

## Attribution and Flags

The journal is the primary source of attribution in fedwiki. Fork entries show which sites a page traveled through; the flag icons rendered in the journal strip give a visual history of those sites. A sequence of colored flags in the journal bar is a compact story of how content has moved across the federation — from originating site, through forks, to your current copy.

## Stripping the Journal

A journal can become long and carry attribution from many remote sites. When a page is being repurposed as a template, or when you want it to appear as an original work rather than a derivative, it is sometimes appropriate to strip the journal — replacing all entries with a single clean `create` entry containing the current story. This should be done deliberately: stripping the journal erases the record of where the content came from.

## See - Flag, Fork and Newer - Neighborhood and Twins