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Continued from archives

The archives are full of people asking for POVFORK to be changed, with respect to the "deliberately created" scenario.

Good forking • Bad forking (victory declared by someone proposing the (hopefully) ill-fitting analogy of 11 people in a bar) • Asking for clarification, where Uncle Ed throws the baby out with the bathwater, according to the common misconception that article content is equivalent to the article. Uncle Ed was later to return to the talk page to complain about the interpretation of the rule he had failed to delineate conclusively in the Bad forks and good spinoffs" section, where he was beat down with ad hominem by FeloniousMonk
• Problematic sentence shows that the wording of POVFORK is so pushy that a desperate plea for sanity was inserted: "Since what qualifies as a "POV fork" is itself based on a POV judgement, do not refer to forks as "POV" — except in extreme cases of repeated vandalism". This is obviously clunky, and presents problems, but the root of the problem is the pushy scenario
• Creating a spinout shows the root of the problem that the pushy scenario attempts to address: pushy editors. We can discuss democracy in Cuba in terms of what aspects of Cuba are democratic and which are not, and create something useful. Or we can argue with someone who wants to say there is no democracy, none ever, definitely not, no, and sink his attempts to say so over and over again and claim victory with a stupid rule. Now, I am the first to admit that making the new article does not always work out, as there are again, pushy editors. But the problem is not the article, and the solution is not a rule that is redundant to WP:POV, it is topic bans based on POV violations. "Provided that all POVs are represented fairly in the new article, it is perfectly legitimate to isolate a controversial aspect as much as possible to its own article, in order to keep editing of the main article fairly harmonious" - Uncle Ed.
• Abuse of consensus vs. breaking up a page points out that "On the other hand, it is also possible for editors to abuse "consensus" by maintaining a biased version of an article. Any attempt to add well-referenced opposing points of view might be falsely labeled "POV forks". If the spin-out article conforms to NPOV, then this is not a POV fork." FeloniousMonk beat down this too, with contradiction and ignoring of the central point.
• POV pushing and neutrality:

"Sometimes, in an attempt to preserve bias in an article, some Wikipedians will band together to "vote" that a spin-off is a Misplaced Pages:POV fork, even when it's not." Uncle Ed called a Vote on policy:

1. Winning an AFD vote is not proof that a particular article is a "POV fork".
2. Discussions about this should show how the new article is violates NPOV, and should not be resolved merely by counting votes.
3. Discussion should also show in what way the multiple articles advocate different stances.
4. Deleting a "POV fork" is not automatically the best way to resolve an NPOV dispute.
5. Retooling the articles so that they each are neutral is preferred.

...was rejected 3 to 1. I can't even see how anyone could vote against those points. Point 1 is true, as WP:CCC shows. It is evidence, but not proof of anything other than the current consensus, and even consensus can change. Point 2 is now, and may even have been at the time, part of Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion#How to discuss an AfD, Misplaced Pages:Deletion_process#Consensus. Points 4 and 5 can be inferred from the fact that POV is not listed as a Deletion#Reasons and it is logical that PoV content can be replaced by neutral wording.
• Ownership forking revision proposal has a very good idea on the subject, the best I have seen so far. It makes an interesting point about biased articles whose content is not POV; while such articles can afford the opportunity of debunking the bias, they are more often shorn of such balancing with assertions of UNDUE etc. Separating out the rules for POV for article subjects and article content would be a fine idea, imo.
•Comparing a sentence from the guideline cited in Removing sentence which pre-dictates fate of a duplicate article with the current article shows that "deliberately created the fork" was objectionable enough to one editor that it was replaced, and that edit has stood the test of time (altho not of course CCC)
•Content forks, POV or otherwise, ... has a lengthy title describing a solution I do not agree with, but agrees with me inasmuch as: "a POV-fork is also a content-fork." and less so with "There is sourced material in the forked article that belongs in the other article", which may or may not be true; that is why there is a link to WP:MERGE in the guideline. But the point stands; POVFORK is an unnecessary merging of POV and FORK.
•What forking is is an earlier version of my arguments against POVFORK, and is in some ways better. I went away and did not respond to a discussion about it, which devolved and was dropped.

Even if this does not get attention to the subject now, I hope that it will preserve the history of the discussion. Anarchangel (talk) 00:59, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

"...deliberately created...": It is pointless to argue the intentions of the article creator, mostly because there is never any firm evidence of it, but also because the article subject is either valid or invalid whatever the reasons for creating it. FORK and NPOV are the rules to apply; POVFORK is erroneous in some of its focus and redundant in the rest. Anarchangel (talk) 02:54, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

"Split" versus "fork"

POV fork is typically taking the content of one article (the whole) and reproducing it in another article from an alternate point of view (the whole or parts of the whole also appearing elsewhere in a new POV suit). What is not addressed is taking content which belongs together as subject matter (the whole) and POV-dissecting it into separate pieces (the parts) so that the aggregation of the parts is now << than the whole and the whole itself has been POV-eviscerated. PЄTЄRS J V ►TALK 14:34, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Basic concepts of/introduction to

There is an AfD discussion on Basic concepts of quantum mechanics that is exploring the limits of allowable content forking. RockMagnetist (talk) 01:02, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Commonsense idea: Userspace subpages are very helpful

We all know that there are people who just want to write without interference. Think of them as "columnists" -- people who strive for NPOV despite having opinions- but still admit their work has not yet withstood peer scrutiny yet.

Some authors prefer a massively-collaborative workflow-- one that can often be interrupted by software-caused edit conflicts. Other authors are more comfortable with the traditional journalistic style-- a single author submits a work to the community for review, edits, and alteration.

WP:Openness is a big problem facing us all. If nobody uses Misplaced Pages in ten years, we are failures. We need to rethink things. Whether userspace forks are "welcome" is something we have to consider-- while 2001 users were content with common space, 2012 users expect to have a 'reserved space' for their own views. Our inability meet that social compact may be an element in our user loss. --HectorMoffet (talk) 10:19, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Issues with this guideline?

With recent events, like Personal life of Jennifer Lopez and Ashton Kutcher on Twitter, I wonder if there is something wrong with this guideline. If not, then shall this guideline need an expansion, like a mention of content about a living person? --George Ho (talk) 02:43, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Axis occupation of Vojvodina#RfC:Is this article subject notable, and if so, is it an acceptable fork of existing articles?

You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Axis occupation of Vojvodina#RfC:Is this article subject notable, and if so, is it an acceptable fork of existing articles?. Peacemaker67 (talk) 10:16, 12 August 2012 (UTC)Template:Z48

Is transclusion considered a type of content forking?

Recently, User:Flyer22 has asked me to revert several article transclusions that I have made, and has described my edits as an unacceptable type of content forking, despite the fact that transclusion is not mentioned in this article at all. Is it acceptable to transclude parts of one article into other articles, as long as no content is directly copied and pasted from one article to another? (As I understand it, "content forking" refers to the creation of multiple versions of the same page, whereas transclusion creates a single version of an article and automatically mirrors that version across multiple articles). Jarble (talk) 22:12, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

See here for the main discussion I had with Jarble about this. To summarize my objections with regard to this matter, he was copying articles in their entirety in sections of other articles, using "Main article" or "See also" in those sections to point readers to those articles as though they offer anything different than what the sections do, and he was achieving this copying by using articles as templates. He doesn't consider this inappropriate WP:Content forking because he was not directly copying the content into articles. It's clearly the type of transclusion he was doing that was the problem. Flyer22 (talk) 22:22, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

And I didn't ask Jarble to revert; he offered to do so, and did so (for example, here and here), because even he (as shown in those edit summaries) seemed to realize that he had created massive redundancy and presumably didn't want to cause any more trouble for himself or for others. Flyer22 (talk) 22:29, 9 June 2013 (UTC)