New MAST Guide - Reader's Guide

Summary:

A new guide for joining users, focusing more on consumption of content rather than creation.

New MAST Guide - Reader's Guide

OptimisticLucio 10 Aug 2021 10:01

Posting with TheMightyMcB's permission.

The MAST Guide Rewrite team is proposing a new, standalone guide: A Guide for Readers. The guide's purpose is to help users new to the wiki by showcasing different aspects of the wiki such as SCPs, tales, and GoI formats, showing how to navigate the site and find new content to read, and going over some of the basic rule-related procedures.

This thread, along with the onsite mirror, is intended to give readers a place to voice concerns regarding this guide's use as a standalone page, not as a rewrite of the Newbie Guide.

This thread will be open for 5 days and is open to all staff.

Last edited on 10 Aug 2021 10:10 by OptimisticLucio Show more

Re: New MAST Guide - Reader's Guide

Zyn 11 Aug 2021 06:57

Hmm. Some queries from me:

1. Is the title up for change? "Reading Gateway" or "Database Introduction" or the like, so it's distinct from other guides that aren't as interactive/full of links to click.

2. I feel like currently, the setup is a little unapproachable and bland-colored. I feel like if this is meant to be a reference page people repeatedly return to, it could help to color-code some of the sections and also make the places where links/lists pop up more eyecatching.

3. Given that the bit about the rules is first, I'm not sure how many readers will go through the entire page if they don't immediately see what they're looking for. (To be honest, I'm also not sure the Rules section needs to be as long as it currently is.)

4. This currently seems a little… unfocused, I guess? It's got elements of the Guide for Newbies in it (rules, interaction with community, etc.) and doesn't quite always tie into the "reading the site" umbrella. I feel like this could be easily addressed by having the sections relabeled? So the rules bit can have details about reading-related conduct expectations, such as voting and commenting. Ditto for interactions with the community, maybe specifically feature discussion threads that may be of interest to readers in particular, such as the Introductions forum section for readers, the Foundation Universe forum for discussing lore, and the Fan Work forum for looking at additional media.

5. Could just be the recovering college student in me, but… any chance we could slim down some of the paragraphs so the overall page has less of a technical manual flavor and more of a… I guess edutainment approach kind of feel?

Last edited on 11 Aug 2021 07:18 by Zyn Show more

Re: New MAST Guide - Reader's Guide

OptimisticLucio 12 Aug 2021 06:30

1. Yeah. The title is not essential to the contents of the guide, so it can be changed to whatever people feel is appropriate.

2. I see what you mean. Personally, I'm horrible with making things look visually appealing, but I could pass it by someone who's better at that than I am.

3. I personally agree, but when we wrote this guide one of the writers insisted on having the rules section be as thorough as it currently is (since it was initially made as a replacement for the Newbie Guide). If enough people agree with this, we could probably cut it down or scrap it entirely.

4. See the above section - this was initially meant as a newbie guide replacement. It wasn't supposed to be specifically for readers, it was meant to be a general intro guide which focused on reading as the default rather than writing. We're still working on that, but some issues were found that need to be taken care of first.

The plan is still to have it replace the newbie guide eventually, but since the guide proper has been ready for a few months now, we're thinking of putting it out there already instead of having it sitting in a sandbox.

5. We were trying to hit that feeling, so if you could elaborate on how we missed that it'd be extremely helpful. Other than the rules section, I felt like we hit that approach, so maybe we just have different outlooks on how that works.

Re: New MAST Guide - Reader's Guide

Zyn 12 Aug 2021 07:44

1. I personally recommend some variant of "Portal"!

2. I have some people in mind—mostly MAST and Tech. I imagine it would just be a matter of adding some color and maybe some icons.

3. In that case, I would recommend structuring the page setup as Intro to SCP > reading SCP articles > reading other format pages > readers and other site media > readers and site rules. So gradually move from "any reader, site member or not" to "site member who actively interacts with the community".

4. If this is meant to be a guide focused on reading/navigation for the time being, I think it's best to focus on that rather than attempting to add additional stuff for the eventual Newbie Guide replacement.

5. Some of the sections are more wordy/repetitive than they need to be, kind of overexplain instinctual information, or otherwise feel kind of bland in terms of word choice and tone. For example:

The most well known aspect of the wiki are the SCP Articles. SCP articles are clinically written stories, where each story features over one of the items or creatures under the SCP Foundation's containment, going over how the item is contained, what the item is, and any additional information the researcher writing thought would be useful to know. Since its inception, the wiki has grown to catalogue over 5,000 SCP Articles. These articles have been split into different Series', each made up of a thousand articles, organized by numerical order.

What does that mean? Series 1 starts at SCP-001 and goes through SCP-999. Series 2 starts at SCP-1000 and goes through SCP-1999. Series 3 starts at 2000 and goes through 2999, etc. Most of the newer articles are in the newest series, currently Series VII, but sometimes slots open in the older series which authors are then more than welcome to fill in. This is why you can sometimes find stuff in Series I that was written recently, despite most of the content there being around for a decade or more.

I personally would have presented this as something like:

SCP articles are the most well-known pages on the wiki. These flash-fiction stories in the form of scientific documents describe objects, creatures, people, locations, and many more phenomena that are kept locked away from the public eye—thus "contained"—by the SCP Foundation. SCP Articles include information about the specific protocols enacted to keep anomalous entities in containment, and can have logs of further worldbuilding details such as experimental tests, prominent incidents involving the anomaly, and interviews with persons of interest.

The wiki listing organizes SCP Articles into series, consisting of 1000 articles each. Series 1 (which started back in 2008!) runs from SCP-001 to SCP-999. Series 2 runs from SCP-1000 to SCP-1999, and so on. As of 2021, there are currently over 5000 SCP Articles on the wiki!

The more recently written material tends to be found in the Series with higher numbers. However, number slots will occasionally open up in older Series. Authors are welcome to fill older slots as they are available; this means you may encounter a recently written Series 1 SCP Article even though the majority of the pages in that Series are from over a decade ago.

Re: New MAST Guide - Reader's Guide

OptimisticLucio 12 Aug 2021 06:30

[This was supposed to be a reply to zyn, ignore this!]

Last edited on 12 Aug 2021 06:30 by OptimisticLucio Show more