Implementing stricter controls over publication, combined with the revision of existing materials. Does not appear to be viable, considering previous EN discussions.

Absolutely not viable. We already have enough people upset with a greenlight process that isn't required for posting. Until we get a LOT of authors willing to crit newbies, I cannot support anything like this.

We kind of… gave up monitoring post Series 4, only checking on winners of major contests. We've also observed comparatively little mention of later series among the general population, unless by fans of specific authors. This leads us to believe that fragmentation of the project is taking place.

This I definitely feel guilty of - I barely read articles outside of contests anymore! Sometimes even established authors/friends can easily fall through the cracks, and I can imagine this being even worse for newer members. I think this is the crux of a larger problem that makes people feel like the site is bloated with content.

Full agree. I can't imagine why anyone would want to just stop the site from continuing to write stuff.

This.

I know that expanding the numbers to five digits is a sort of weird mental jump, but it likely was even back when they filled out the full thousand.

Yes, it absolutely was, speaking as the author of 1000.

Curtailing creative output shouldn't be seriously considered by the staff who are trying to curate creative output. Just counterintuitive and unnecessary.

This as well.

Comrade Xander

Too many works to keep track of. And of uneven quality at that. We kind of… gave up monitoring post Series 4, only checking on winners of major contests. We've also observed comparatively little mention of later series among the general population, unless by fans of specific authors. This leads us to believe that fragmentation of the project is taking place.

Possible remedies:

Implementing stricter controls over publication, combined with the revision of existing materials. Does not appear to be viable, considering previous EN discussions.

Taking a protracted pause so that authors and readers could reflect on what has been built so far. Limited contests may be held on topics left insufficiently explored. This appears to resonate with the proposal of Dc_Yerko, and also allows to continue publication in some form, as well as to divert attention to undervalued works, thus addressing sentiments of Rounderhouse and aismallard.

Also, even if staff doesn't feel that changes to posting are worthwhile, we should still consider the point that that with more works on EN it can be harder for smaller branches to find interesting pieces to translate (outside of big contests) with an increasing posting rate.

I do agree there should be a pause. There's so much stuff already! 10k is not a small number of articles. I don't think I ever read more than five hundred articles on this site. It's not a secret that the vast, vast majority of stuff sometimes just slides under the radar. We got so many tries to promote lowly read articles - site news, underrated and underread, wikiwalk - but everyone kind of knows that later series SCPs are kind of a "scene that celebrates itself" deal. Focus on what we already have and bring out the gems. Even articles between +100 and +200 range are kind of underrated these days - there aren't really any blockbuster articles like we had during the heyday of site.

The SCP Wiki survived so long because of its consistent high quality of articles, and despite the many bumps and doubters on the way, it somehow is still chugging along. There's a lot of articles that get posted and just forgotten about. We definitely should just keep this site going and let people contribute to this wild, weird universe that we got going on, but we also should take a pause and truly look back at what we already have. Maybe not quite a Kalinin threshold deal, but putting a pause on things after a momentous 10kcon would be a good time for it.

If we were really going for a Mass Edit 2, it'll really truly be a massive one. I don't know if we are ready for that, but something similar to shake out low quality articles and highlight underrated ones really would do us wonders.

That said, I agree with aismallard that there should be an effort to polish up 1-9999, maybe a program to promote lower-rated articles so they can be treated fairly and not just left in the 10-30 purgatory and encourage users to spruce up/rewrite older works.

A few other notes:

• I like the idea of making a series encompassing 2000 slots and having a kcon hold 2 categories for each 1X000 slot respectively

• Don't label series 1-10 as epoch 1, label them era 1.

• Consider changing up how we navigate between SCP pages a bit, there will be a lot of them and at some point scrolling through 20 different hubs of 1000 pages will get tiresome. I'm not sure how, but I'd like to throw it out there.

Also, I like Rounderhouse's idea for opening two series in the same K-con.

One day, heaven help us, we might need to open up three or more new series at once.

I do think there's a useful idea in there when it comes to opening up multiple series at the same time. We could, as an example, have the 11 000 and 12 000 slots kept in reserve at the same time as people fill in the roughly two thousand available spots, and CO could map out the timing of the 11 000 and 12 000 contests such that they release at the most opportune times for writers and minimize burnout.

Open the next block and keep at it.

slashannemoo

Also, the hexadecimal solution would complicate matters with branches that use a prefix instead of a sufix, such as CN, and ES (e.g. SCP-CN-XXX, and SCP-ES-XXX).

Compatibility with other language branches is an important concern if we open up any kind of solution that involves official SCP listings having Latin letters in them.

Might not hurt to open up 2k slots at once, do 1st and second place Kcon prizes as the thousands, but ultimately I'd leave that up to the contest folks over at CO

I do like the idea of having the first ten k grouped up as an "Era", while also keeping the OG series designations and lists as well.

10k is a hell of a threshold and I definitely do feel we should have it be a bang, but we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Maybe at 20k :p

My thoughts are that while we will obviously go past 10k and shouldn't stop here, we should take some time to look back at what we have. I don't have a specific idea of what would make sense to do, but there are a lot of surviving but low-rated articles in the 002-9999 range, and we have some kind of activity centered around that either before or soon after opening new series. There are plenty of underrated works in there that deserve better than to wallow in the low ~10-20s, and there are also some articles with low scores that maybe wouldn't have survived if they had gotten more attention at time of posting. Maybe even a listpages with random articles that are rated less than <20 but not recently posted could be sufficient, who knows. Something like a "Mass Edit" is obviously not going to work with the way the wiki works now, but I do feel we should have some kind of collective project to help borderline articles sink or swim, and more solidly finalize our current block of articles.

That said, we will need to open up five-digit slots, a pretty major and exciting change. I don't think there's much reason we need to change things from the way we do K-cons, but I will suggest a couple things:

• 1000 articles is not the same amount it used to be. When the first K-con occurred it was literally doubling the total number of available slots, but now we've been having one every few years. Likewise, we should adjust how we do K-cons and open up more slots in each one based on recent activity. K-cons are massive events, and if we start doing them excessively frequently due to posting rate, this risks community burnout and other undesirable outcomes. K-cons should be big exciting events where everyone brings their best, and Community Outreach / staff-at-large should try to plan slot openings where they aren't super close to each other (so they're rare, special things) but also not super far apart (so people get bored or tired of waiting). (I personally think a good interval to aim for is 2-5 years, but I'm sure many on staff will have other thoughts on that. I think particularly avoiding K-cons being an annual event, or worse, having multiple in a year, is an important goal.)
• So, we will need to open up multiple series in one K-con. We can decide if we'll open up all of the larger range at once, or do something special like reserving certain slots or ranges of slots for other events. For instance, say we do a 2-series open due to posting rate, so there's SCP-11000 and SCP-12000 open. Should it be like, first place gets the former and second place the latter? Or SCP-12000 is reserved for some other event, some new tradition we start? Or maybe K-cons get multiple themes you can apply for, so each contest will have a number of winners equal to the divisible-by-1000 slots being contested for.
• A "series" should always refer to a range of 1000 slots, starting at a "X000" number and ending at a "X999" number. It's much easier to maintain systems if we don't have to keep special lists where it's like "oh this contest opened up 3000, this one only opened up 1000, this other one …" (If you think such bookkeeping isn't a big deal, I would like to direct your attention to the Wikipedia article Leap second). I think it is nicer organization-wise (and computer-wise) to codify "series" as 1000 slots irrespective of how many are opened in one K-contest. Maybe we want to use a different term for "K-contest" or "the slots opened by a K-contest"? Because I think there's enough existing code and cultural meaning around "series" for that to not be worthwhile to mutate halfway through.
• Edit: Like with Yossi's suggestion, addition of the term "epoch", which refers to a group of 10,000 slots, starting at a "X0000" number and ending at a "X9999" number.
• Edit: The first post-Series X contest should involve much closer planning with Community Outreach and staff before it is announced. Obviously while the theme and some rule changes should be purely the domain of the Contest Team, the overall structure of this pivotal event should not come as a surprise to staff or the community, but should instead get hammered out by a series of proposals and policy discussions here on O5. Whatever ends up happening will be, naturally, precedent-setting, and so a higher degree of staff and community oversight is important.

I'll quickly run through some of the specific suggestions:

• Ending posting of SCPs is obviously a no-go. I do think we can do things like pruning/rewriting old articles, but the goal is to curate the collection, not "pulling weeds to make space", if that make sense. We're not upper management looking to cut headcount just for the sake of it.
• Site hosting is completely orthogonal and unrelated to site content. As a Tech Team captain, I am not willing to accept any situations where what content is one host depends on some weird division based on contests or series or whatever, that sounds like a nightmare and is counter to our mandate as staff to preserve and grow this collection of CC media.
• I like hexadecimal, and it would avoid SCP numbers from being too long, but it's just not something I see happening. For one, it should be noted that numbers that are all digits we use in decimal are also valid hexadecimal numbers (e.g. 0x10 in hexadecimal is 16 in decimal). Second, as Kufat mentioned, this will be a confusing shift for everyone who is not a programmer, because people are not used to digits being in SCP numbers. Similarly, people will be confused when we tell them letters like g or v cannot appear in their SCP number. Maybe some day we will use non-base-10 numbering, but if we do, I would strongly suggest we use base 36 so all English letters can be used. And since the slot space for such articles is way larger, we should consider starting with 2 digits rather than 3 like for decimal. Edit: Due to potential conflicts with SCP identifiers from translation branches (e.g. SCP-CN-XXX), I cannot support any proposals which involve non-decimal digits in a mainlist series.

There's no need to cut things short.

We keep up with opening 1000 slots at a time, we continue how we've been going. :)

3rd i consider to be dumb, as hell, any wikijump initiative ought tl also port any old article, rather than letting them die on wikidot.

4th & 5th just look ugly to me.

So due to this i consider 1 the only good option for the site moving onwards

idk i don't see this as a convo that rly has to happen

I didn't either but then there wasn't an obvious consensus in staffchat when I asked

Keep opening series indefinitely — though frankly I like the thought of opening two series at a time instead of one and making the future 11Kon a two-category contest with you only being able to submit to one category; winner of each is 11k and 12k, respectively. Increases the time between kcons — but that might be putting the cart before the horse

idk i don't see this as a convo that rly has to happen

• Opening the SCP-10000 through SCP-10999 range (and continuing to open new series of 1,000 indefinitely thereafter).

Anything different is… I don't have anything nice to say so I won't say anything at all.

Kufat goes through the edge cases for other options in sufficient detail so I won't reiterate. At most it might be worth looking at the timing and size of kcons to try and keep them roughly evenly spaced.

I think that if we as staff collectively agreed to kill the site by preventing further posting of writing in its primary format (SCPs) there would be a strong argument to censure us all.

Opening the SCP-10000 through SCP-10999 range (and continuing to open new series of 1,000 indefinitely thereafter).

This is what I'd recommend, with the caveat that we might someday want to open larger series at a time.

End it right there with SCP-10000.

If we did this, most of our writers would just move to a new mirror of the site and most of our readers would follow.

Reset and move to a new site entirely (i.e. Wikijump), leaving the first 10,000 in place in the old location and starting anew somewhere else.

Given Wikidot's problems, this is basically just the old "delete the wiki" joke with extra steps.

Switch to hexadecimal after finishing the 9000s.

This would work, except for the part where staff spends hours explaining why you can't use G-Z in your SCP number, unless you make it a tale, which you can, but then you can't put it on the mainlist, please stop trying to put it on the mainlist…

A series block with a slightly different acronym, i.e. SCP-A-001 to SCP-A-1000 (and continuing to open new series in blocks of 1,000 and four digit numbers thereafter).

This is the same as the first option except for a slight cosmetic difference. It'd be my second choice after "just keep going"; it'd break more regexes than the first one but that's probably not a big deal.

This would actually encourage people to read more articles, even if from an older series or how low-rated it might be. With ten thousand SCP articles throughout the site, there will surely be enough deleted (thresholds or other reasons) for people to post usually, albeit on a less frequent basis. I believe the quality of what survives will improve, instead of an impossible quantity of articles quickly forgotten.

Edit: After reflection, I support Dc_Yerko idea (on O4 mirror) about having some sort of "pause" when we reach 10k. Since it will have the same positives of a stop but… without the numerous cons.

EditX2: My initial idea was stupid. I took too long to realize it.

A recent Reddit post prompted me to consider the question of what we do after the SCP-002 through SCP-9999 range has been filled, and what we plan to do after that is filled. A brief discussion of this in SOSS directed me to make an 05 post about it and get some preliminary thoughts out regarding this (we're still likely two years or so out from this mattering, but it is good to have this procedure discussed well in advance).

What do we want to do after the first 9,998 slots are filled up. Some of the ideas floated in staffchat included:

• Opening the SCP-10000 through SCP-10999 range (and continuing to open new series of 1,000 indefinitely thereafter).
• End it right there with SCP-10000.
• Reset and move to a new site entirely (i.e. Wikijump), leaving the first 10,000 in place in the old location and starting anew somewhere else.
• Switch to hexadecimal after finishing the 9000s.
• A series block with a slightly different acronym, i.e. SCP-A-001 to SCP-A-1000 (and continuing to open new series in blocks of 1,000 and four digit numbers thereafter).

This is just a topic for general discussion to assess our feelings right now, rather than to actually settle policy just yet.