The newer entry in the twins header of a fedwiki page indicates that a more recent version of the page exists somewhere in the neighborhood. It is a prompt, not an automatic update.
The twins header showing the *newer* link alongside site flags. The most recently dated copy in the neighborhood is shown first.
## What Newer Means
The twins panel shows every copy of the current page that the wiki can find across your neighborhood. When one of those copies has a more recent journal date than your own version, the *newer* flag appears. The federation surfaces this difference by comparing journal timestamps as your neighborhood is assembled — no active notification, just passive discovery.
## How to Respond
Clicking the newer link navigates to the newer version on its home site, opening it in your lineup for inspection. You can then read the changes and decide whether to fork it back to your own site - absorbing the upstream edits into your copy. This is a conscious curatorial choice. The federation never overwrites your page automatically; you remain in control.
## Why It Matters
*Newer* is how the federation surfaces divergence and convergence without forcing either. Sites are autonomous (your copy is yours), but the federation makes the existence of updates visible rather than hiding them. It is fedwiki's answer to the question: > Has anything changed? Yet this question is posed without requiring a central authority to track the answer.
## Relation to Fork Symmetry
*Newer* is a partial step toward fork symmetry. The person who updated the page does nothing to tell you - there is no push notification, no write to your site. The difference is discovered only when your neighborhood happens to include their site and the federation compares dates.
True fork symmetry would involve active notification in both directions; *newer* achieves passive, pull-based discovery. It depends entirely on the two sites sharing a neighborhood.
## Relation to Thoughtful Forkers
Thoughtful Forkers pay attention to *newer* signals rather than ignoring them. When a thoughtful forker sees *newer*, they open the upstream version, read it, and make a judgment: is this better than what I have? Should I merge ideas rather than wholesale replace? The *newer* flag is an invitation to engage, not a command to update. Ignoring it is a valid choice; so is forking the better version.
## The Twins Panel
The twins panel is how fedwiki makes the distributed, multi-site nature of content visible at the page level. *Newer* is one of its signals — others include the count of twin copies and which sites carry them. Together they give a sense of how widely a page has traveled, whether it has diverged, and where the most active version currently lives. The twins panel is the federation made legible.