Wikibooks:Forking policy

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

This page contains a proposed draft for a Wikibooks policy or guideline. Discuss changes to this draft at the discussion page. Through consensus, this draft could become an official Wikibooks policy or guideline.

Forking is where a textbook on some topic is copied internally in Wikibooks. For certain reasons described below, forking is not permitted on Wikibooks. The GFDL however does permit forking externally, and if one so wishes, can do so.

Forking can harm Wikibooks in that it divides the community effort into producing a Wikibook, essentially lengthening the time it creates to finish a Wikibook and creating redundant information. This policy aims to encourage community cooperation, unify contributor effort, and reduce the amount of redundant material on Wikibooks. Where a dispute occurs, actions such as those listed on Wikibooks:Resolving disputes should be taken, rather than internal forking.

Forking for the following reasons is not permitted:

• editorial control: matters of formatting, layout, structure, images, that do not affect core content greatly
• content inclusion/exclusion: matters of appropriateness, factuality, instructionality relating to core content

The creation of multiple Wikibooks on the same topic is permitted in circumstances of

• appeal to differing audiences: it is suitable that a Wikibook targeted to adults and a Wikibook targeted to children can both exist
• differing approaches: it is suitable that a Wikibook on chemistry that takes an instructional approach (eg., studying chemistry) and a Wikibook taking a historical approach (eg., the history of chemistry) can both coexist.

A new Wikibook that has a significantly different approach to a topic than the existing Wikibook should make this clear in the introduction. Such a book should not copy a significant amount of content from the existing book and it might be polite for each book to advertise the other (ie: a Relativity book for physicists might advertise the mathematician's version: "See Relativity, a graduate mathematical text for a mathematical approach to this subject").

Where this policy is not taken into consideration, for Wikibooks forks that are not permitted:

1. a warning to the forker of the book, authors of the original, and notices to both the talk pages will be made. Both parties should endeavour to merge the fork back to the original.
2. where this fails, either by one or both parties actively disagreeing to reunify the books, or after two weeks, a notice that the fork will be deleted in two weeks will be placed on the fork page. If this time period expires and the forker of the book requests this deleted content available, administrators should readily endeavour to do so. However, if the forker replaces this content in the Wikibooks main namespace, it becomes a candidate for speedy deletion.