I'm still not sure whether or not this proposal is:

A. Implement collections AND then use them to promote tales

or

B. Promote tales using collections

I've been assuming A. I think B is a waste of what collections could be. If we control what collections exist, and we only allow SCPs on a case by case basis, then it doesn't matter.

1. Absolutely. I can't imagine the upkeep of collections being possible without a specific team in mind. Forwarding the responsibilities to another team is an option, but really not preferable in this case.

2. I'm neutral on this, but from what I've seen, it's been the topic of some disagreement. I think we should really try and figure out our stance on this before going too much further, even if one side is clearly outnumbered.

3. Not that my opinion here is particularly valued, but given the points above, I'd be inclined to give this a bit more discussion. However, if those who can vote believe it's ready, then so do I.

On the three points raised above for continued discussion:

1. A team is absolutely necessary. Given the size of the team that will be necessary and that it will largely focused around a single goal, I'd advocate for it being a separate team a la Wikiwalk with a view to possibly integrating it into MAST once the ground/grunt work of getting everything into collections is done.
2. I think, given what this proposal aims to fix, allowing SCPs at any point is only going to dilute the effectiveness of the overall policy. Keeping the option open for the future is all good, but I'd personally rather we avoided the inclusion of SCPs - they don't need the attention and their inclusion solves a problem that doesn't exist.
3. I can't vote so I'm not sure if it's my place to say, but assuming there's continuing consensus and no major issues arise, yes.

1. Definitely more useful than I thought, so yes.
2. No SCPs on these lists.
3. I cannot vote yet but, in all cases, it's the people who can vote who decide.

short response

As such, I'm proposing a compromise: Since we are planning on collections being a staff-run initiative at first anyway, we can move forward with the initial plan of staff-curated lists, see what the reception is like, and then consider opening them up for personal creation. I think this will give us the opportunity to work out the kinks in what we want with collections anyway, and then potentially open it up if there's sufficient interest.

Additionally, I am adding a timer to this discussion. The main points I'd still like to see more discussion on are:

1. The creation of a Collections Team (Organization still up in the air)
2. Should we initially limit SCPs in collections? (This does not rule out their later addition, only in the initial stages)
3. Are we confident in this direction to move towards a vote?

- The fact that all the subproposals are in fact parts of the same big proposal (and not individual proposals like I thought) can be worrying about how big it is, but for a problem that we try to solve since a few years, I think that concerns about that are, in fact, a little bit irrelevant.

- For me, it would be weird and a little bit off-topic to include SCPs in collections of Tales. I know that sometimes, we can hear users who say about an SCP "DIS IS A TAAAAAAAALE!", but frankly, I never get it. So, for me, including SCPs is not something we should do for this initiative. Plus, Wei' is right about the fact that they don't suffer of a visibility problem. The "out-of-universe crosslink between Tales and SCPs" showed by Lazar can have an interest, but… I dunno. I'm still really not sure that we should allow SCPs to be on it. But maybe that's just me.

- I'm for including the Tale Series on it, obviously. A personal wish of mine would be to prioritize the first Tale in each series if we do that. If, in a list, people find a Tale that is a part of a Series but are in the middle or in the end of the Series, there's a risk to a less better understanding of what's going on.

- I agree with Wei' point about personal collections. I still think that letting only author-page eligible users doing that is the best solution, but I've no problem with extending that to users with greenlighting privileges.

- I think that, for making the official collections, a special team could be more useful than I originally thought.

Was supposed to be more longer, but it's the night, it's late and I'm tired, so I will leave it at that for the moment.

Why to allow SCPs in collections

SCPs in collections as a jumping off point

Due to the nature of tale readership at this point, collections will be composed of works most readers haven't read, at least to start. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think collections could be seriously enriched by including SCPs, to draw readers in. It turns collections into "List of things I haven't read" to "List of things I haven't read except for SCP-XXXX".

Collections as an out-of-universe crosslink between tales and SCPs

With TSAT's option #1 code, we can use SCPs to point at collections. My wildly optimistic hope is that we can use this to guide people away from the usual Series 1 articles and that get circled like vultures to other, less-well known parts of the site. My slightly more pragmatic hope is that this is another avenue to expose readers to collections, and therefore tales.

Mitigations

Encouragement of collections as a tale promoter first by minimizing SCP usage in the first batch

The way collections are coming about is unusual compared to other formats on site in that we're constructing it from scratch rather than inheriting a format we then adopt - somewhat akin to the difference between a constructed language and a natural one. With staff and well-known authors frontloading the collection queue, we can actually set the community standards based on how those are. Articles that crosslink to 682 get downvoted no one does that now. There's no reason we can't set that standard from the very beginning and discourage more than a handful of SCPs being in any collection, much less the 'popular' ones.

Soft enforcement of a ratio during critique and posting

One of the criticism of the ratio enforcement is that it's going to be hard to police long term, as collections grow and change. I don't think it's as important that old/private collections have too many SCPs - I think it's more important public staff-managed ones as well as new collections have enough tales to actually accomplish our goal.

After that, I'm not sure policing is worth it - if a collection is posted with 5 SCPs and 15 tales and we mandate a 1 to 3 ratio, if down the line that becomes 9 SCPs and 18 tales, our goal is still accomplished.

Collections with only SCPs should be banned and those than become primarily SCP should be discouraged, but I think the costs of banning SCPs from collections wholesale seriously kneecaps the utility of collections.

Only staff members should be allowed to *post* collections. … Staff could and should take suggestions for lists … Any personal collection which would actually be useful would be better off polished a little, sent to staff and posted as an official collection.

This approach makes a lot of sense to me. It certainly nulls a lot of concerns I had on the previous page of this thread, while still being open for contributions to the supercollection from users. There's just an approval process. That's fine by me.

Personal collections, as currently suggested, are all but entirely useless. They'd serve as worse versions of genre collections at best, and completely unhelpful lists of not remotely similar pieces at worst.

Agreeing here as well, with the caveat that the approving staff should always have an open mind about collection suggestions, and that "we already have enough collections" should never be used as a reason to deny a collection, as we're currently doing for some tags pending the tag rework.

Some form of tale collection system is definitely a good idea. I don't know how many people use the current tale searching options, but I certainly don't and they don't look very useful to me. Anyway, let's get into the four subproposals:

Subproposal 3:
Yes, I am aware that 3 doesn't come before 1. But it's easier for me to lay out my thoughts in an understandable way if they're written with the assumption that people already know my opinion on this, which is that I definitely support some form of collections team. I'm not especially bothered about whether it's a MAST subteam or its own team, but it should exist.

Subproposal 1:
Genre and theme collections both make sense.

Subproposal 2:
Slightly hot take here, but only staff members should be allowed to *post* collections. This could be done with some form of shared account similar to the INT translator one, or just by members of the collection team. Staff could and should take suggestions for lists, or even be sent partial/fully completed lists, but putting staff in control of what's actually posted fixes all the issues with possible collection bloat and would be much more convenient if anything needed major changing. However, any user would be allowed to add pages to already posted lists. These would be removable by staff members if deemed necessary.

Subproposal 4:
I like it. Not much more to say about this.

Thoughts not directly linked to any one specific subproposal:

SCPs and GOI Formats

GOI formats are an easy one here. Being just as underread, if not more so, than tales, they should totally be permitted to be in collections.

SCPs are more difficult. Without (likely unnecessarily complicated) ratios of SCPs:Non-SCPs, this proposal risks becoming an invitation for people to post lists of SCP articles they like. This does nothing for tale accessibility. The best option here is likely to prohibit SCP articles from being included in these collections.

'Official and Personal Collections'

Personal collections, as currently suggested, are all but entirely useless. They'd serve as worse versions of genre collections at best, and completely unhelpful lists of not remotely similar pieces at worst. I honestly think these are better off staying as lists of cool articles some people already have on their author pages. Any personal collection which would actually be useful would be better off polished a little, sent to staff and posted as an official collection.

On a somewhat related note, I don't think drawing a line between objectivity and subjectivity is a worthy endeavour. The line is blurred at best, with something as simple as a genre collection being impossible to categorise completely objectively.

How I Would Do It (summarised):

• A collections team would be created. This could be a MAST subteam or its own team, I'm not particularly bothered.
• This team would create some lists of tales and GOI formats to kickstart the initiative. I'd say these should be 25-50 pieces long to begin with.
• The collections hub would be posted along with these; they would be linked on the hub. There would be instructions on the hub of how to contribute, which would either be by suggesting a topic in the discussion thread, or by messaging a staff member with a partially or fully completed list.¹
• If the collections team see a topic they would like to create a list for, a member should reply to the suggestion indicating such. Additionally, any other user would be free to submit a list made based on a topic suggested in the thread.
• The team would decide on whether to post lists they received in PMs, and could also edit or add things to lists prior to posting them.

Should SCPs be included in these collections?

At present, no. While I think it would be great to include them in the future, at present, the immediate issue pertains to tale visibility. SCPs don't suffer from nearly the same issue of being impossible to search for like tales are, which means that they're rather low priority for me at the moment. Given the sheer amount of work that we'd have to do to also include every article into a collection, I think this is best left for the future. All of the provisions that are being made in this proposal are more or less format-agnostic, meaning that it should be simple to slide in SCPs into the collections, or perhaps create separate collections for tales and SCPs. Making arbitrary designations for tale to SCP ratios seems unnecessarily hard to define and getting away from the core purpose of this proposal, which is to increase the ease with which readers can find more tales.

Accordingly, I'd like to suggest that the collections be tale only during the staff creation period, but open it up to SCPs at a later date. I'm amenable to tweaking this, but I'm wary of any solution that may further obscure tales.

Should we create a Collections Team?

Absolutely yes. I understand the concern that others have raised with regards to the size of the team required, but that only points us more in favor of creating a dedicated team to handling this issue since it is so large. A temporary team is totally fine for this, and the organization of such a team under MAST or CO is also fine-but we need some kind of team to facilitate the task of adding every tale into a collection.

Similarly, this can't be a policy that we only apply moving forward; to do so would be to ignore the 3800 existing tales on the site. Relying on users to simply add tales to a collection will also only result in the few well-known and high profile tales being added to collections, which also defeats the purpose of this proposal in increasing tale organization and visibility. Again, the final goal of this proposal is to get every tale into a collection. Some form of staff team to help organize this effort is going to be necessary. Pushing this off to users or simply waiting is not going to solve the issue.

I'm not discounting the fact that this is going to be a large endeavor on the same order of magnitude of Wikiwalk, but I think this an entirely worthy use of our time. The longer we push this off, the worse it'll get.

How do we deal with types of collections and their redundancy?

This is certainly a topic that will merit more discussion should we approve the overall concept of creating collections. Croquembouche and Riemann both brought up excellent points about redundancy and how granular these collections should be. Croque raises concerns about redundant collections, and Riemann brings up a great point about having either too many collections or too many tales in each collection.

My answer to both of these is that it will be up to staff to create at least the initial collections and their respective sub-collections. I think Croque's idea of "objective" collections is actually perhaps a better choice for staff-approved collections. My concern with this is us having to hem and haw over whether or not "Tales featuring ghosts" and "Tales featuring dead people" are different enough for us to summarily delete one or the other. Others have raised the idea of user-proposed collection categories, much like the Tags suggestion thread, and I think this is a great way to get user input on collection categories while not forcing us to waste our time deciding which collections are sufficiently different enough. Additionally, with staff-approval of major collection categories, we can start with a solid list of say, 15-20¹ initial categories that are beefy enough to give readers a lot of material to work through while not being so long that they're pointless.

An important thing to note is that there's no reason a tale can't be on multiple collections. Perhaps a tale is both "Comedic," "Tragic," and "Apocalyptic" at the same time-nothing says we can't include it in all of these categories for interested readers. The goal is to get every tale into at least one collection, but getting some into multiple collections is also great-the more pages that they're linked on, the more chances they have of getting read.

How do we deal with tale series?

A user shared a concern with me in PMs on this topic, specifically concerning the inclusion of tale series and how to organize them by type. I think this is where collections really shine, because we can treat series as their own individual mega-tale, so to speak, with special attention dedicated to their status as larger works. Heck, sometimes readers want to read through something long and beefy, so a collection of tale series would even be warranted-a "long-form reading" collection, if you will.

Tale series can also no doubt fall into other categories, and can be treated like any other tale in that regard (i.e, which genre and thematic categories they fall into).

Who can create collections?

This has been a topic of some disagreement. My expanded thoughts on this are as follows:

• Create Official and Personal Collections. The idea here is that we make a distinction between official collections that will contain every work, and personal collections that can be organized entirely up to the creator's tastes and/or desires.
  • Official Collections. These are staff-sanctioned Genre and Theme Collections (i.e, drama, comedy, etc) where staff are in charge of creating the specific collection categories. To reduce our workload, I would imagine that anyone is allowed to add their own works to these pages, but staff are permitted to remove them should they find one that is clearly inappropriate/posted wholly for the sake of self promotion. I want to stress that this is an extremely rare case-we should give a wide latitude as to what tales fit in each category, as determined by the author.
    • This is also a great place for users to give us their suggestions for more collections, to be approved if there's sufficient interest/need.
    • This is also the bulk of where I imagine the theoretical Collections Team would be doing their up-front work, but following the conclusion of the project, MAST could likely take care of pruning collections as needed.
  • Personal Collections. We allow the creation of personal collections where there are no restrictions; their creators are allowed to add whatever tales they want, make them collaborative, anything so long as it doesn't violate Rule #1 (i.e, "Collection of the worst tales")
    • Said collections are subject to deletion procedures as normal.
    • Collections cannot consist of only a single creator's work. That's just an author page, folks.
    • EDIT: To be clear, these collections are welcome to have any work that the organizer cares to add, whether that's tales, SCPs, or even art pages. Thank you for the clarification question, Calibri Bold does not match any existing user name.

As for the requirements before creating a personal collection….as mentioned before, I'm leaning towards users with greenlighting privileges. This feels sufficiently lenient enough to allow most users to have a say in collection creation, without being so open that we get flooded with a ton of collections that only have the most popular works. As an aside, I don't see an issue with non-greenlighting users contributing to a collection so long as the collection organizer is amenable to that.

Thank you all for your thoughts so far. Let's keep this ball rolling.

With respect to the sub-proposals above:

1) Genre and Theme: This seems like the first natural way of dividing tales into broader categories. I can see utility for someone wanting to search for examples of Urban Fantasy over Horror, etc. As such, full support here.

2) User-Curated: Not a fan of leaving this to staff only, as we are a very small group on the site, and there are many people in our community who are not on staff who could create very fine tale collections. Personally I'd prefer that it be limited to author-page eligible individuals to offer a small amount of quality control off the bat, but would also be amenable to Green-Light eligible users as well.

3) Collections Team: Mmmmm. I imagine that a full team for this s not necessarily warranted, as it seems like more in the realm of a MAST sub-team. That said, I would defer that decision to the proper captains.

4) Collections Block: Personally, I like option 1, as I feel if we are going to implement this new gadget, might as well go all out and provide all the details rather than a random option.

1: Sounds great. This would definitely be useful for people looking for specific types of genres and themes.

2: We already have the User Curated Lists, but this sounds fine. I think having entire recommendation pages that could be voted on would be cool in theory, but not actually that useful for what we want to accomplish. Not against this, though.

3: This sounds infeasible and way, way too much of a world load (unless we employ like 100 people, which has its own issues), and although it would be the best in theory, it isn't actually do-able unless we're masochists. In my personal opinion, the pay-off does not match the sheer effort that'd need to be put in here.

4: This is probably the best proposal, though I am in favor of linking related tales specifically to that SCP instead of just "general categories this article is in." If we want to link all articles in "categories" (instead of just tales), then this combined with the first (and potentially second) proposals would also work fine.

Those are my two cents, thanks for reading be sure to like and subscribe thank you god bless

First off, I do think there has to be some restrictions on who can create Collections. Restricted page types aren't alien (i.e. author pages, GoI/Canon Hubs), so if the two main concerns (quantity and quality) are sizable, I'd personally opt for a combination of 2 and 3 (author page and greenlight eligible users). Restricting Collection creation entirely to staff, to me, limits the purpose of Collections and, to an extent, the point of the wiki, being a collaborative writing wiki and all. I think if you're eligible for either an author page or greenlighting, it proves you're at least a somewhat experienced user who has gotten involved in the community, and can be trusted to create a non-frivolous Collection, as opposed to, say, JimboFromAccounting who joined the site yesterday.

That being said, I do like the idea Calibri presented, having both staff sanctioned Collections and user-organized Collections, á la Essays and Guides. Although, that does present the concern of who, exactly, can edit and contribute. I think it emphasizes Sub-Proposal 3 and the importance of a team to both create and maintain these Collections, should they be open to contribution for every site member.

As for Sub-Proposal 4, I'd go for the 1st header, which honestly looks sublime. My main concern here is that header might become too cluttered, should an article get featured in too many Collections. That being said, I understand it's more so for informational purposes more than anything else. If a user actually wanted to find a specific theme or genre, they could easily search for it elsewhere. Still, I would like some kind of set hierarchy for how they're shown, preferably Staff Collection -> Genre Collection -> Theme Collection -> Personal Collection.
If I'm honest, Personal Collections seem like the least important here, as they don't have the same range of appeal as a genre or theme. From what I gather, their most useful tenets are to be used as bookmarks for an author, for fans of an author, or as CSS playgrounds. This… isn't a gripe as much as it is a muse, but eh.

Otherwise, I'd say everything seems very thought out. Fantastic work!

Subproposal 1: Genre and Theme Collections

Welcome to the coastline paradox. Should either of these become staff led efforts - how many genres are there? How many subgenres therein? This is a potential nightmare to navigate, and a strong reason I'm against genre tags. There's a similar issue associated with themes, but I might be given to be kinder to thematic groups because it's not ordinal.

So - the simplest solution to this is "Any collection needs to have a minimal number of entries", and to be honest, I'm against subgenres as a staff led effort entirely. Same with themes. But if we're going to push through with this, how many tales need to fit a given theme/genre to make that worthy of a tag? If we get too granular, then any searching is going to become atomised and useless.

Subproposal 2: User-Curated Collections

Selection effects, my old friend. Pro "greenlight givers" and above are able to create collections.

Now then. Are SCPs allowed in these collections? If so, how many? If we impose a ratio of SCPs to tales, how do we enforce that?

The goal is to increase tale visibility. If we start allowing SCPs, then that pollutes the motivation here. And there's a great possibility that any SCP-inclusive collections end up strongly correlated with popular SCPs, which will further in turn hurt tale visibility. How many tales about 076 do we need?

Subproposal 3: Collections Team

Inclined to agree this should be a temporary team. Not sure how I feel about having a test case for organisers. Seems like it might be "how well are they able to be tested" rather than "how well are they able to identify genre"

Subproposal 4: Collections Box

TSAT is cool, this is cool.

1. I like the idea of both theme and genre collections. In my opinion, I think genre collections are something that should be more staff-run, à la Wikiwalk; it would serve as the standard and starting point for other collections, and it would ensure that all tales are backlinked at least once, as all pages will be able to fit in at least one genre.

I like theme pages as being more topical as something that would let people seek out tales by content, but I think it would be better as something organized by users with approval from staff, as content organization is less universal than genre organization, and would be better organized by people wanting a hub page for articles with such content. One possibility is that users could pitch a theme collection in a thread and a list of relevant articles, similar to the tag suggestion thread, then be responsible for writing and organizing the page itself.

2. I love this. User-curated collections would be a ton of fun, and I think users would seriously enjoy having their own page devoted to recommending articles they enjoy. I agree that it might have issues with quality control, but I think this could be alleviated with three basic restrictions. First, users could only have one personal collection each. They would basically be like author pages: one page, customized and personalized in their own way, and showcasing articles they would like to see read. Second, they could be limited to users with greenlight privileges. This would at least partially ensure that the folks making these are competent and know what they're talking about. Finally, such collections should have a limit on how many of the author's works would be allowed on the page, and a lower limit on how many of other people's works they could showcase. This would prevent people from using such pages simply as a secondary author page.

3. I think this could work, but only if the user base was at least partially responsible for curations. With what I wrote above, I think this team would be responsible for putting together genre collections, and maybe be responsible for approving theme collections.

4. Terrific idea, although I think the first option is far preferable to the second, as it's a far more comprehensive method. The second option is far less comprehensive and useful, and only benefits from a slightly improved aesthetic.

TL;DR: I like this proposal, some suggestions for how this would be organized based on collection type:

Genre Collections: Staff-organized, organizes all tales based on genre.
Theme Collections: User-organized, collects tales based on content, pitched to and approved by staff similar to tags.
User Collections: User-organized, collects tales based on user preference, limited to users with green lighting privileges, one per user.

First comment: I don't see any reason not to categorise SCPs at this time. I understand the idea is that tales need more visibility, but pretty much any collection I can think of that doesn't start with 'Tales that…' could include SCPs. Accurate collection will probably have SCPs in them and inaccurate collections aren't of interest to anyone. We could say "collections that feature only SCPs are not allowed". I'd be cool with that. We could also say that MAST will only be adding tales to collections, but that users are free to add SCPs to them.

Second comment: relating to Subproposal 4: Collections box: This is a fantastic idea and I think it's absolutely necessary. Huge kudos to TSAT for not only coming up with this but also proving that it's possible. No other comments on that.

Third comment: relating to Subproposal 2: User-Curated Collections: One concern that you've raised, weizhong, is that there could be too many collections. Redundancy is a fairly large concern in this, to me.

I see two types of collections:

1. Objective collections: Stuff like 'Horror articles', 'Articles with a jumpscare', 'Articles that explore identity', 'Articles featuring a queer relationship', 'Articles that eschew the standard format', 'Articles that take less than 5 minutes to read'. These collections don't take into account the opinion of anyone except the article's author. They represent facts about the article that can't really be changed.
2. Subjective collections: Stuff like 'Croquembouche's favourite articles', 'The best antimemetic articles', 'Articles that leave you feeling sick', 'Depressing articles'. These are based on the opinion of the reader, not the author. The collection's creator may disown it and give it to the community. They may not revert that.

It's the mass production of objective collections that I believe is concerning in terms of redundancy. Subjective collections are totally fine. However, there's no good restricting who can make an objective collection, because everyone is a reader and everyone is capable of judging objective facts about an article. To that effect:

1. Anyone should be allowed to create and curate an objective collection, however they may not restrict contributions - these collections will be open to all. Objective collections may not be duplicated, and if someone tries to make one, the page should be deleted and the user should be pointed to the existing collection.
2. Only users eligible for an author page should be allowed to make subjective collections. These collections will be curated solely by that user, with contributions from other users forbidden, unless the collection's curator chooses to allow such contributions.

Who is allowed to contribute to any collection, and who is the collection's primary curator (if any), should be clearly stated on the page.

Collections created and curated by staff must be objective collections. Collections created and curated by a user who is also a staff member may of course be subjective collections.

TL;DR:

• SCPs should be included in collections.
  • MAST shouldn't have to add SCPs to collections, but users can, if they want to.
  • A collection that contains only SCPs shouldn't be allowed.
• There should be different rules for objective and subjective collections.
  • Anyone, including 'staff' as an entity, can create an objective collection.
    • Objective collections are open to all.
    • Objective collections cannot be duplicated.
  • Only users eligible for an author page may create a subjective collection.
    • The curator chooses who can contribute to a subjective collection.
    • A subjective collection's curator may disown it and give it to the community. They may not revert that.
• Who can contribute to a collection must be clearly stated on the collection's page.

Alright, so. I really think this is a great idea, like these seem like great ways to get more eye on tales, especially with a good handful of people being tale focused authors.

Questions

Though, my main curiosity comes in when we have user repeatedly making things like "Haha! Look at this garbage." Which, I know that wouldn't fly (From what y'all had said before.) But how would we prevent this? Would it be like the Collections Team be the ones to deal with the users (Like C&D for making collections)? I'm unsure if that would solve the issue. What about a group of the same tales over and over and over again? I know we don't want redundancy, but I fear that may be what we get.

Another concern I have, is that we will have tons of popular tales paired together and redundancies in terms of old/popular tales being showcased and not smaller, newer tales. I think the idea that Lazar Lyusternik had about the proposal that could work. I like the idea of staff and trusted authors starting it off, but again we kinda run into the issue of popularity. I fear, with the offsite people, known notoriously for series one and popular SCPs, will only feed into the popularity of these tales and collections. I'm not saying that they can't be included, but I worry they will be prominent and just kinda throw off the entire goal of this.

I like the whole idea of mixing all of the sub-proposals, but I'm unsure if it would be entirely ideal for this situation? Like, the genre thing could be helpful, but I think it's going to be rather hit or miss depending on where we put these collections. Like, general users may just not see any of the work the staff will do on this, and it will kinda be for nothing. I guess more what I'm asking is how we're going to advertise these collections, and how we would get people to take a look?

On sort of a note, if someone writes something Horror, would they be the ones to add it to the Horror Collection, or would staff do it? Would we be doing tags for these collections? Like, for authors/MAST/whatever to tag and then the Collections team would take the tag and shove it into the Horror Collection. Though, I’m wondering if that would even be useful since MAST is busy and I’m unsure how many people would care enough to look through a tag, but it may be helpful for Collection Staff.

Suggestions

What if we did a hub containing all of the genre collections, then below that there was a list of user made/staff made/whatever collections? Then we could have an entire thing for the collections, keeping everything organised and in a place we could keep track of. Though, that makes things a little harder too, since new users could make collections and not put them in there, causing gaps in knowledge. I figure that could be handled by the new staff team (assuming that is still a thing we wanted to do.)

I don’t think we’d want to do something like the collections approval, but I’m not sure if we could get away without it? People could make completely redundant collections and nobody would really notice beyond when someone actually takes time to look though and notifies staff. For this reason I feel like Collections Staff would be very valuable even before we start the process of opening to the rest of the community.

For the actual posting of collections, I feel we need a format for them. Something about what the collection is about and “why” it should exist then the collection list? This could be beneficial so we have a formal way to submit collections to the site, as well as having everything neat and tidy within those collections and making everything easier to find.

Final thoughts

Ok! So, I REALLY like this idea. I feel like we have enough of a footing here to work with. I fully support this idea. Aside from the concerns already aired from other users and myself, I think this would be a great addition to the site as a whole. I may be a bit biased, coming from a tale-oriented perspective, but I feel this can do well. I agree with the others on this thread in terms of what they’re saying. Though, I believe that we need a bit of a mix of every subproposal.

Very excited to see where this goes.

The reason I separated them is to facilitate discussion about each piece more specifically. Apologies for any confusion that this caused.

What users can create collections?

I was the original proponent of authors-only, but, I've come around to opening the floodgates to all users on a handful of conditions:

• A trial period (perhaps a month) for collections where it is either staff/trusted authors only - I guess I would call this the manual approval phase.
• Major staff buy-in at the beginning, and preferably with major onsite and offsite personalities contributing as well.
• A 'collections contest', open to participation by all

Collections are a new format - I _think_ we can head off any problems by setting a high standard early on to ensure only 'worthy' future collections exist.

The one caveat I would point to here is that unlike most articles onsite (everything but the collab logs), collections are a living document instead of a static one, and will never truly be finished.

Collections Team

Collections without a collections team doesn't really so much solve the problem as prevent the problem from getting worse - even if all future tales end up in a collection, there's still a few thousand that aren't.

I am perfectly willing to wait until Collections have a foothold in the userspace before starting Collections Team, but the problem presented by tales like The Pond, that 20 people read 10 years ago and then never again, likely won't be solved without some kind of staff intervention. I just favor the direct approach.

Do SCPs belong in collections?

I'd say any kind of article - SCP, GOI Format, tale - belongs in a collection, but SCP-dominated (or worse, SCP-only) collections should be discouraged, because, as others state, there's a much better way to navigate those and they're in less dire straits. This is where 'staff sets high standards early on' comes in. I can also see this being handled from the top down - e.g. no collection can have more than two SCPs per non-SCP entry in the collection.

Article additions

I think collections has at least a mild possibility of expanding casual readers beyond our usual 3-numbered favorites with collections footers and the info box. Collections links are pretty much out-of-universe cross-links, and we could likely get a lot of mileage out of "Like 682? Here's other articles people think are like it!"

Another almost farcical suggestion would be webring-like behavior set up via collections for articles. E.g. 12 articles of similar theme, linked in a circle. This brings one of the SCP listing's greatest strengths to tale categorization - the numbering scheme. Part of the problem with tales is that you read a tale, and that tale exists in a vacuum (or a canon). There's no obvious way to continue. For SCP, there's a very obvious path forward - increment the number by one and keep reading.

I am, at this point, more interested in discussing how creating these pages will increase the visibility of tales. How are we planning to organize the collections? Where are we placing them? How are we advertising their existence?

Edit: See my response to Gee's comment on page 2.

- Genre & Theme Collections : Right now, this is probably the subproposal that I like the most. I remember than a user had tried to do their own genre collections for Tales, asking people for suggestions. I don't remember the pseudonym of the user (which is a shame), but this was an initiative that I thought was really cool. So, for me, it's probably the best, in my opinion.

- User-Curated Collections : The points you raise about the limits of this type of collections are totally valid, but I think we can trust the judgement of a part of the community. This is why, if we take this path, I have a preference for the option 2. Making an author page can take a long, long time and this is a time you can use for reading more, Tales including. So, the author page-eligible users have already an experience that many others don't have at the first place (not a jab here, it's just that when you are in the site since less longer, inevitably, you have less experience about all that) and, so, better "judgement". So, yes, the option 2 is probably the best.

- Collections Team : A little bit hesitant about it. I mean, I see what you're coming from, but that seems for me a bit too much. It really feels like that for solving something pretty big, we create something even bigger. Even if it seems less harder than we can think on practice, the way it's presented and the plan seems unnecessary big and difficult to set up, at my opinion.

- Collections Box : Not much thoughts about that, but after checking the post you linked in this part, I can say that I really like the second proposal TSAT made on this one. Pretty good.

For the rest, I'm really happy that this discussion is opened because I can confirm that discovery of Tales can be really hard, outside of the hubs for Canons (I've discovered many Tales "by accident", some of them were in the site since many years and I wasn't even aware they existed until I found them), so I cannot support this enough. For the rest, here was my thoughts.

TL;DR Edit : Have a preference for proposal 1 and, in general, we really need to do something about that.

1. The tales hub page, which is an alphabetical/author filtered page.
2. The Tales Edition listing for a specific SCP Series.
3. Canon hubs
4. GoI hubs

These four places are likely to receive the most traffic from users wanting to explore the broader range of content provided on the site. This leaves out things like contest pages, tales series (such as Antimemetics Division and Acidverse), and author pages. Anything else could be considered as standalone and nigh impossible to find. Organizing collections makes sense to me if only to encourage discovery.

As for which sub-proposal I support, I think 2 makes sense for the most part. It doesn't necessarily need to stay at a certain level of restriction either; it can start as a staff-led project and then move forward in opening it up to authors/dedicated reviewers. Although, it may require a kind of collections team to get that started, unless I'm misunderstanding the proposal here. Reading the weizhong wanted thoughts about each individual aspect, give me a while to update this.

Tale discovery sucks. Plain and simple. At present, we have nearly 4000 tales, and our only means of finding entirely new tales consists of using the Random Tale button, or finding tales by author/creation date. None of these fundamentally address how most people want to find content, which tends to be through similar genres, narrative structures, or even page length. Tales being unread has been a meme since I first joined the site nearly seven years ago, and continues today.

Concurrently, this is an issue that is getting worse. The longer we put it off, the more tales will be added to the wiki that will only increase our work down the line. While we could continue with our current structure, I believe that it's a disservice to the many tale-oriented authors on our site that their works are essentially impossible to find if people don't remember them.

Past Action and Discussion

The impetus for this post was a recent discussion in SSSC about the continued difficulty for readers to be able to find new tales on the site, in addition to a series of discussions in #site19 along the same lines. Lazar Lyusternik and pxdnbluesoul in particular have been big voices for pushing initiatives that increase tale visibility, starting with this post by bluesoul and continuing with this post by Lazar. While I encourage you to read these posts for the best clarity, I've done my best to synthesize the content of both proposals (since they are by and large the same) below:

Tale Collections
Collections are lists of other works on the site (in this case, tales). You can consider them to be an expansion of the User-Curated Lists, which, to my knowledge, have somewhat fallen by the wayside in prominence.

• Collections can be user generated, staff led, collaborative, or more
  • This is more or less the only point where Lazar and bluesoul's proposals differ: whether or not staff should lead the effort or make it more user-oriented
• Collections can be personal favorites, genre-based, or centered around a theme (i.e, Foundation mistakes, queer characters)
• Collections are open to anyone to create
  • Standard deletion rules apply
  • No negative collections (i.e, "Collection of tales that suck")
  • No redundant collections

Both proposals also discuss the idea of creating a staff team that handles this project, though Lazar pushes for it upfront, whereas bluesoul leaves it up for creation at a later date.

Some other past proposals have involved the use of genre tags. For a variety of reasons, the least of which is the Technical Team's repeated assessment that they are both cumbersome and not useful, this proposal will not be discussed more. Additionally, this discussion included SCPs as part of the collection. Due to the amount of work this would require (outlined below) as well as the fact that SCPs are significantly higher profile and easier to find, I am not discussing this at present. Should people want to add them to this discussion, I'll be happy to comment more about them.

An Updated Proposal

I think bluesoul and Lazar's ideas are both, at their core, good ideas. However, I'd like to formalize their suggestions into a more streamlined proposal and also offer my own thoughts on some of the finer points of these discussions while opening the conversation up for more opinions. As such, consider this an updated proposal to re-open the conversation on the topic of tale collections. As a note, the following subproposals are not meant to be standalone-my intention is that we try to adopt all of these.

Subproposal 1: Genre and Theme Collections

This is more or less borrowed verbatim from Lazar and bluesoul's points. The concept here is that we have two major classes of collections based around genre (Think "Horror," "Drama," "Comedy, etc), and theme (Think "Exploration," "Dialogue-focused," "Existential,") where every tale can fall into at least one of the categories.

Genre and Theme Collections are pretty much exactly how most readers find new works to read in, say, a library or a book store, so this makes sense for our own organization. I think the wonderful thing about this idea is that we can create sub-collections within a larger collection. For example, an all-purpose "Horror" collection encompasses a great deal of tales, but could be refined into sub-collections for "Existential Horror," "Body Horror," "Gruesome Horror," etc. This enables readers to find more specifically a tale in the flavor that they're seeking to read, or perhaps just browse a genre at will.

Thematic collections also serve their own purpose for readers perhaps looking to read a style of tale. This could be "Featuring Senior Staff," "Dialogue-Heavy," "Queer Characters," or more. I think sub-collections are less useful here, but my own perspective is, of course, limited. Overall, I think both collections will start off being something that staff designate, but could potentially be opened up to user suggestions if some trend in the site zeitgeist takes off.

Subproposal 2: User-Curated Collections

Both prior proposals raised the idea of creating user-curated collections, with no restrictions on their creation aside from typical voting procedures. While I think this is acceptable, I also think that this is a subject that perhaps bears more discussion. My primary concerns with this idea are as follows:

1. Low quality collections. Low quality coldposts and other soon-to-be deleted content frequently floods the recently created pages list. Adding the potential for more pages that clog that list and require deletions is more work for us and obscures actual quality content.
2. Too many collections. What worries me more than quickly deleted collections is actually that they won't be deleted and we'll simply have too many of them. I can't imagine many users mass downvoting a user-curated collection for simply not having the articles they want, which leads me to worry that we'll soon have an abundance of collections with (1) low amounts of content and (2) largely redundant content. This defeats the entire purpose of collections to begin with; an abundance of unread collections is no better than our current system.

As such, I think it merits at least some discussion on whether or not we want to put forward limits to who can create user-curated collections. There are a few possibilities, ranked from most to least restrictive:

1. Staff only. The most restrictive option. Only staff can create collections, and we more or less limit user-curated collections to the user-curated lists.
2. Author-page eligible users. We leverage our existing restrictions on creating author pages to create a limit. If someone can produce 3 quality pages, then they deserve a collection of their own.
3. Greenlight-eligible users. We already utilize the greenlight system for screening the vast majority of drafts that make it onto the site; one would imagine that we value the opinions of those who read the most drafts and often see the most content, period.
4. Anyone. The original choice. If it lives, it lives.

I am partial to some combination of 2/3 because of my concerns above. Any other solutions in this area would be greatly appreciated.

Subproposal 3: Collections Team

Name pending. Regardless of what we do, the end-goal of this is to eventually get all of the tales on the site into at least one collection so that they aren't totally lost in the aether as they currently stand. This is understandably a gargantuan effort, on the same scale that Wikiwalk was. I don't think it's possible to do this without some kind of staff team, and I personally think that shunting this onto any existing team is unfair to the (already quite busy) members of said team. While I think the responsibilities of this fall somewhere in between CO and MAST, meaning that perhaps a sub-team is warranted, some kind of independent team for this project is sorely needed.

Since Lazar and bluesoul were the original proponents of this idea, I defer the leadership choice to either/both of them, but I am also volunteering myself should either be unwilling/unable or if they'd like a vice-captain. Of course, anyone else that the moderators/admins find to be the best is also an option. More importantly, my proposal here is concerned with the general membership of said team.

While we will no doubt have robust representation from amongst the ranks of OS and above, this is a task that remains unbelievably large. However, I think we can borrow some of the ideas from the user-curated lists (namely, the desire to reduce workload on active staff members) and the current structure of the Forum Crit Team with its Flights: appointing a large number of JS (or some other sub-designation) to assist us with curation. The exact numbers will be up to the determination of the Collections Team Captain, but I envision this as being at least 20 members in total.

• Why recruit so many people? Because as mentioned above, this is a massive task. Categorizing all existing 3800 tales (not including any new additions) across 20 members is still 190 tales per person. Optimistically, assuming that someone is able to do 10 a week, this will still take half a year. Realistically, with a number closer to five a week on average (if that), it'll still take almost an entire year to complete.

• How can we screen this many people? This point is valid, but I believe unnecessary as a concern. As opposed to Wikiwalk, Licensing, or Forum Crit, all of which employ(ed) large numbers of volunteers, this task doesn't require much "checkable" work. Evaluating drafts requires an eye for critique that needs to be trained, licensing issues require education on CC By SA 3.0, and Wikiwalk required an encyclopedic knowledge of other articles and the judgment to understand which links did/didn't make sense. All this requires is simple reading comprehension and the ability to recognize narrative elements. As with wikiwalk, I suggest that authors reserve the right to remove their work from collections at their discretion. For 90% of cases, I imagine that this won't be an issue, and any small problems with misplacement of tales in certain collections likely boils down to taste, or is easily correctable.

• What are the screening requirements? This will be up to the eventual Captain, but I imagine that some form of interview is a good idea, as well as having a "training" set of tales that have been pre-selected by OS members as falling under specific collections to evaluate whether or not the recruits can place tales into categories that make sense. Again, I stress that this isn't a hard test by any means, and differences due to taste are totally acceptable-better to have a few misplaced tales than let them not be seen at all.

The specifics of the team can be debated further; consider this just my thoughts on what a team could potentially look like. If MAST and CO want to take over this (or even Technical Team), then they are welcome to do so.

Subproposal 4: Collections Box

TSATPWTCOTTTADC drafted some excellent ideas for potential collections footers that can be found here. I'm most partial to the first option, as I think it's mostly unobtrusive, and does exactly what we want in showing people potential links to other works that are similar to the one that they just read. Further thoughts about this would no doubt have to be discussed with the Technical Team, but I think this is a stellar idea. I have no other thoughts about this.

I am opening this discussion up for anyone with O5 access. Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

EDIT: To clarify on a point that was made to me in PMs, this proposal is not about the fundamental attention being dedicated towards tales relative to SCPs. I don't think we'll ever see tales hit the same level of readership as SCPs, and I'm not sure that they should. This proposal is specifically about the fact that tales are impossible to find. At present, if everyone who read a tale forgets about it a few years later, it is quite possible that the only place that it is linked to on the entire site is the alphabetical/author tale lists, meaning that it is effectively never going to be read. SCPs at the very least have the benefit of numerical browsing, wikiwalk cross-links, and tags that assist with their discovery, whereas tales are rarely linked to from other pages/works. Any discussion on the relative attention that tales receive is, in my opinion, out of scope.