Crosslinks Proposal

What is your plan to reintroduce cross-posts and shared canon?

I have a multi-pronged plan, in the hope that if one or more parts fail, the rest succeed.

Systemically clean up Series 1 articles. Some will be rewritten to some extent, but most merely brushed up. This project is already approved and underway.

Series 1 and other classic articles are in fact fundamental material for our fiction, and trying to keep them as essentially museum pieces forever is a bad thing for everyone. Especially since it pretty much just turns into people dumping on the old stuff: "Series 1 is terrible, don't read it."

It's also important — vital, in fact — to preserve what made people love the articles in question in the first place. Sometimes this is just one element of an SCP; sometimes it's almost the entire article. But this is what we have a rewrite team with admin oversight (and assistance) for.

Back-edit cross-references into existing SCPs.

This is the most controversial part of this proposal. First, a link: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WikiWalk

The SCP Foundation does indeed contain a wiki walk: mostly consisting of parts of Series 1 and a few tales. The reason it's not bigger, of course, is that after Fish left the site, staff cracked down on crosslinks hard.

Series 1 is the entry point into the SCP Foundation wiki, but it pretty much feeds in on itself and then ends. It's no wonder post-2010 stuff is little recognized; why would it be, standing in isolation from everything else?

My argument is: Staff artificially killed the wiki walk. Therefore, staff should artificially fix it.

This can be done in three main ways:

(1) Update the standard SCP template with a section for References. If an SCP/tale/whatever is based on that article, it gets linked there. Can be either automated or manual.

This has not been approved as of yet. However, the Technical Team is on board with implementing it. I don't 100% understand how well automated implementation would work, and manual implementation would be a bit of a pain, but either way this is something I strongly support on principle.

(Per Crayne, the Tech Team lead: "The way automated references would work is that we'd read the page source for every scp and tale, identify SCP articles mentioned and either actively add links, summarize those links at the bottom of the page, or both, and would then put the content back on the page.")

Beyond difficulty of implementation, though, there have been aesthetic objections to this. Several people have suggested keeping such crosslinks on attached sub-pages (experiment log style), which probably would work better for highly-referenced articles, but not necessarily for less-referenced articles.

Most likely, such a template would be framed with an in-character handwave and be visually set apart from the rest of the article. Depending on presentation, it could be either more on the OOC side (like a rating module) or more on the IC side (like a copyrighted image that credits the original real life author with "Agent [Artist's Name]"; something like "this document is relevant to the following records and reports: [list here]").

Additionally, it's up in the air whether such a template addition would be mandatory or optional. I would predict that a visible/obvious form of it would be optional, just like images are optional in SCP articles now, and that perhaps a hidden variation — or a variation hosted on another page — would work for articles for which their authors don't want the template used.

(2) Manually add in crosslinks in already existing articles.

This is something we can do already, but not necessarily on a systemic basis. It will almost certainly be an enormous pain to deal with, since adding in "naturalized" crosslinks that fit with the original article can require a bit of effort.

A point of clarity: staff will edit works with permission only, just as it is for rewrites. (Of course, many articles are under staff purview, which is de facto permission, but only applies to cases where the original authors cannot be contacted.)

As with the rewrites/cleanup, edits will be made under the auspices of (and approved by) the Rewrite Team and Administration.

Crosslink back-edits will need to start with adding links to Series 1 that lead to Series 2 & 3 articles. Second, crosslinks need to be added to Series 2 & 3 articles that reference each other (Series 1 as well).

The hope is that authors not working with staff may also choose to alter of their own free will, by example.

All of this is a huge amount of effort, however. That effort can be ameliorated by utilizing the final category:

(3) Identify, create, and update "hub" SCPs.

The real power of Series 1 and the "wiki walk" has always been the "hub" SCPs, like SCP-682, SCP-914, and the Desire Camera. SCPs that by their nature can link to a huge number of other articles.

Also, unlike the other proposed crosslink edits, editing "hub" SCPs requires no mass approval. Most "hub" SCPs are already open for editing — and many of them are already under staff purview either way. (And Gears, who created many of the greatest of the hub pages, already gave blanket permission for staff updating his work.)

This is where I would recommend starting: identify "hub" SCPs, and prioritize editing new crosslinks into these "hub" SCPs. And link pretty much all the "hub" SCPs to each other — create a "hub" network. This creates the bones of a wiki walk all by itself.

Slightly more difficult would be back-editing Series 2 and 3 SCPs to serve this purpose. There are some that exist already, but there are not all that many outside Series 1, mostly due to a … basically forgotten backlash against 914 and an ongoing anti-682 sentiment amongst a small group of influential vets (most of whom are currently inactive now, however).

This can change, though.

My hope is that some staff/vet members who have lower-rated 'meh' Series 2/3 SCPs that they wouldn't mind seeing changed might offer them up to be refurbished for such purposes.

(Or higher-rated SCPs that would already work fine for this. Just an iffier prospect to totally transform higher-rated SCPs like this. But as an example, my own SCP-1985 is over +100 and could easily be altered to work more like this.)

This is where things get a bit harder, because said mediocrity needs to be fixed along with the transformation to hub SCP. This would only work out for articles which can both improved content-wise and be utilized for hubs.

This would likely end up being a very odd form of rewrite. Ideally, we'd get a sufficiently large pool of SCPs to choose from for this purpose, and a sufficiently large pool of staff re-writers to have the creative resources we need to improve the SCPs as well.

A staff team — likely collaborating with the original authors — would go through the 'list of offerings' and figure out which can be hubbified and which we can come up with entertaining rewrite ideas for.

These are pretty key assumptions for this part of the project to work! — and I wouldn't be suggesting it if there weren't already a number of staff who are excited about being involved in such a project.

So I do know for sure we will have at least a pool of offered-up SCPs, and at least some experienced writers (including myself) interested in rewriting and refurbishing them.

Note, unlike #2, if this can be accomplished, it can easily work for future material as well — articles/tales created after this project is over. People can easily add in newer work to these 'hub' SCPs, and it wouldn't be weird because there's already plenty of newer work in them.

SCP and character tags. This is something possibly implied by the template suggestion above. But there's no real reason not to have tags for SCPs and characters. This is less my area and more the Technical Team's area, though, and they've been investigating this possibility.

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Personal Projects

Some things we're working on to try to allow for a shared canon that aren't technically staff projects.

Reference Pages

• Create a Characters Page ("Persons of Interest Dossier") which will act as a non-required reference sheet for usable Foundationverse characters. (About 70% done)
• Do the same for particular in-universe groups such as O5 Command (this one's 95% finished already), locales such as the Wanderers Library (not started yet!)
• …and miscellany such as lists of established K-Class Scenarios (in progress) and Foundation scientific journals (Photosynthetic & KateMcTiriss are working on this).

The way I'm (we're) structuring these pages will hopefully allow for a lot of ambiguity and allow for contradiction while still providing a coherent resource for what is effectively our "default canon" (and linking to and referencing multi-canon resources as well).

The pages will hopefully end up doubling as places for people to find more tales, which is always good. This is one of several places character tags would work out handily.

This is partly patterned after what TroyL is already working on behind the scenes with creation of official GOI hubs.

(Also, as a side note, Crayne has developed a possible method for allowing individual entries on dossier pages like this to be rated individually apart from the main page's rating. So that could get really interesting.)

Campaigning for old tropes.

The upshot is that a bunch of us want to be able to write stories using a lot of old tropes that are mostly dead due to 'backlash amongst vets' reasons, despite being very popular with the fanbase … and a lot of actual writers, for that matter:

• new author avatars (because they're fun)
• anomalous characters (SCPs as characters! gasp! and if it's done well and not to excess, anomalous researchers too)
• building off the old canon stories
• cross-testing and other oddball research — yes, even weaponization of SCPs if the story works for it
• SCPs that tie into tales and link to them

We do have some story projects going on that involve this sort of stuff, but (since story planning doesn't equal a guarantee of a finished product) this is getting into Shit We're Not Ready To Talk About In Public Yet. Suffice to say that we are at least planning to put our money where our mouth is! We'll see how things turn out.