(Got permission from Sir Ovens to post here (thanks again). This was originally going to be a lot longer, but I got bored.)
It's frustrating to find out the deletion thread for one of your favourite verses is happening the very week you made an account here. However, the fact it couldn't be contained (pun unintentional) by this site is hilarious. Also, there can't be that many people to have their first (thread) comment in a staff thread.
Preamble's over, now for the actual comment: It seems a lot of the debate about whether it should be allowed comes from if it's fanfiction-y or power-scale-y.
Possibly the most fundamental problem with it being fanfiction is that it has
a Licensing Team, but there are other wrinkles to consider. Like the fact that qntm and HarryBlank turned their
Antimemetics' and
The Breach Goes On series (respectfully)
in to novels. What do we do with them? It's infeasible to delete all works of SCP writers from the wiki; in addition to the
RPC Authority, that would include stuff like
Fine Structure, all the works of
Max Landis, the
Neverstone series (which admittedly doesn't have any profiles here), and could easily include your favourite verses due to the anonymity afforded by the internet. And I certainly wouldn't want a world in which all independently published stuff gets deleted. It seems somewhat arbitrary to delete the SCP stuff, including
There Is No Antimemetics Division and
The Breach Goes On (which already have profiles; SCP-3125, Marion Wheeler, Dr. Wettle, etc.), but not stuff like Fine Structure. So do we consider these as separate verses? They are mostly self-contained. But then do we consider their on-site writings as Word of God statements? What about works they've co-wrote, do we consider the works of the co-authors too? Following this chain, most of the wiki will back to eligible for profiles again, which just seems silly. (Also, I don't really understand what SCP is being argued as fanfiction of. Admittedly, I do remember some (SCP) wiki members claim that it is fanfic, but they didn't specify what it's fanfic of either.)
It's a bit difficult for SCP to be power-scale-y since that's
against site guidelines (though not strictly speaking against the rules), so any power-scale-y type stuff that slips through the cracks isn't exactly the site's fault. SCP is rated as powerful here due to a combination of metafiction, mathematics, philosophy, theology, cosmic-horror and high-concept sci-fi and fantasy - most, if not all, 1-C+ verses heavily lean on at least one of those. I mean, Wikipedia leans on all of those; you could make a profile for
Wikipedia's notion of God, scale that to
omnipotence, that to
philosophy,
that to
maths, and considering
how far mathematics on Wikipedia extends, you'd easily have a verse far more powerful than any that have ever been listed on this wiki, yet I don't hear anyone claiming Wikipedia's power-scale-y. (You probably shouldn't turn Wikipedia into a verse, for several reasons.) More specifically, the High 1-A SCP stuff comes from
an article from years before the tiering system was made set theoretic implying a connection between fifthism and the aleph numbers,
an article elaborating on that connection,
an article based in large part on that mentioning this extends to all cardinals prior the Inaccessible, a few articles
mentioning set theory and general maths that makes stuff big, and
some guy's personal philosophy, or something close. The 0 stuff comes from philosophical scaling to the High 1-A stuff, and the MetaFoundation project -
a project to make all the wiki's disparate canons parsimonious, including, necessarily, their cosmologies - equating (what the Department of Temporal Anomalies would see as) timelines with the
universal narrative/story of your life, which would already get that philosophical scaling. As that Who Asked? thread shows, this leads to at least some things being rated as far more powerful than they were originally intended. I do worry that with power-scale-y stuff becoming more notorious, treating it as a literal infohazard will lead to more verses being deleted for mentioning it.
I think some genuine good can be made from sharing knowledge - as all wikis ultimately do - of SCP, it
certainly helped me (thanks Iapetus). I mean, it's got a character literally called
kindness,
a sister site dedicated to eliciting a sense of wonder (on that note, what'll happen to the Wanderer's Library stuff? It's got at least one profile, the Neverwere), and more
heartwarming stuff than
cosmic-horror (note that SCP articles don't get genre tags, and such genre tags have only existed since February - the true number of both is higher than what those pages say). Yet very little outside the fandom focuses on this.
Ultimately though, I think removing SCP from this site will probably be a good thing. It'll help distance SCP from more "mainstream" power-scaling - which already has negative connotations. It'll (hopefully) help people like Iapetus not worry too much about their works being accused of power-scaling. I only came to this wiki because it's a lore/plot listing site (with abilities and cosmology considered as part of lore),
the memes, and 'cause I'm a maths nerd; I can do pretty much anything I wanted to do with SCP on this site on some other site like Heroes or Villains wiki. And then with the verse moving to
whatever this thread decides upon, the commendable work of the SCP Revision Team won't go to waste (I presume it'll still be CRT-able?). I just wanted to address some misconceptions.
Also, SCP escaping the wiki will lead to some good memes.
Hopefully that was coherent enough. Also, thanks to Agnaa for reopening this thread. I know you didn't do it for me, but still.
scp-wiki.wikidot.com
