Deforking the World of Code: A Project-Provenance Map that Recovers Cross-Forge Fork Families that Platform Graphs Cannot See

Abstract

Forks share git history, so a commit surfaces in many repositories and any spread- or popularity-based measure over raw repositories is inflated by orders of magnitude. We release a curated deforking map for the World of Code (WoC) version V2604: p2PFull, which collapses every raw repository p into the deforked project P to which it belongs, built from the global shared-commit relation (51.79M shared-commit groups) via a hub-node star encoding and parallel Louvain clustering, plus capped variants (cap250/cap500) that bound mega-cluster size. The naive shared-history union over-merges: the project graph welds unrelated software into giant clusters (largest uncapped cluster 443,010 repositories, bridged by shared-commit groups as large as 267,200), for the same structural reason author-identity graphs do. A cheap size cap removes the boilerplate-hub bridges; a structural-bridge diagnostic, the cut that dissolved the analogous author mega-cluster, run here but deliberately not applied, shows the post-cap residual is genuine vendored history, robust to the cut, so we leave it intact. We validate the map against GitHub's declared fork graph reconstructed from GHArchive ForkEvents, finding 99.01% edge agreement conditional on both repositories being in WoC. Disagreements fall into two classes: a completeness byproduct (edges GitHub asserts but WoC has not ingested) and the central contribution, WoC-only fork families that GitHub's platform graph cannot represent, including 5.53% multi-forge families and 1.54% whose fork root is not on GitHub. We additionally release a refreshed fork-exclusion list (134.1M children, 3.4x the GHTorrent-era 39.5M) and a detached-fork inventory (455,550 hard-detached edges; 240,441 genuine independent origins). All artifacts are a self-contained, independently hosted replication package keyed to the WoC V2604 collection.