Forking in GitHub refers to making a copy of a repository into ones own GitHub account. Forks are often used to make changes to a project without affecting the original repository, also known as the "upstream" repository. After forking a repository, one can fetch updates from the upstream repository to keep the fork up to date, and propose changes from the fork to the upstream repository with pull requests. Forks can be owned by either a personal account or an organization. Forks have their own members, branches, tags, labels, policies, issues, pull requests, discussions, actions, projects, and wikis. Forks inherit the restrictions of their upstream repositories, such as branch protection rules. Forking is often used in open source projects or when a user does not have write access to the upstream repository.