Why does Duplicate create a child?

Question

matdom asked:

In Supermemo 98, ctrl+alt+d duplicates the item in the current hook, in SM15 it duplicates the item and any subsequent duplicates with the mother item as the hook, creating an ever elaborate branch. How do I change that back?

Answer

Use ctrl+Up to go to the parent element before you repeat Duplicate.

Notes

• Duplicate is part of the process of building the semantic structure of knowledge. In incremental reading it is very important that extracts, clozes and duplicates are children of the original element
• Duplicate was born when it was annoyingly blocked by Children limit (in Options) on large branches. Once you need to execute it on a full branch, and you hit the children limit, you would need to spend a lot of time on re-arranging the branch to fit in the duplicate. This is never a problem with the new solution in newer SuperMemos
• simple workaround is to quickly drag the child to become a sibling or use Ctrl+Shift+V for Move
• if you produce many duplicates of the same element and you want to avoid nesting, precede Alt+D with Ctrl+Up. Once you learn this habit, you will never want to come back to "duplicate as sibling"