Decision (default)
Most Franchises are singular. One Star Wars, one Middle-earth, one Aethermoor. This maximizes authority consolidation and matches how canonical-entity platforms should work for answer-engine discovery.
Decision (exception)
Forking exists as a first-class, explicit feature — not a platform accident. A Franchise may fork when community disagreement is irreconcilable through normal governance channels (Star Wars Legends vs Disney canon is the archetypal case).
- Fork URL pattern:
/star-wars/(primary) and/star-wars-legends/(fork) - Graph metadata:
forkedFrom,divergencePoint,sharedCanonBefore - Commons up to the divergence point is inherited by the fork as a snapshot, with full attribution preserved
- Contributors can route their Power to either Franchise or split across both; nobody's contribution history is erased — it's forked too
Reasoning
Pressure valves already exist in the Constitution. Forking sits at the end of a graduated resolution stack: Home content → Commons proposal → Arbiter review → Fork. Fandom's wiki proliferation happened partly because layers 1–3 didn't exist there.
Unitary default protects AEO. One authoritative /star-wars/ entity beats four half-built ones. When forks do happen, sameAs and forkedFrom schema keep answer engines correctly oriented.
Open questions (deferred — see B-001)
The existence of forking as a feature is decided. The parameters — fork thresholds, approval mechanics, cooldown periods, minimum Power requirements for petitioners, mediation requirements — are explicitly deferred to the community.
Note on founder restraint
The Creator considered pre-deciding fork mechanics but chose to defer them. If the Constitution's decentralization promises are real, the first test of that machinery should be a substantive question with real stakes — not a ceremonial one.