I suggest putting some safeguards into the lottery spotlight. Nothing extreme, just a simple "not two months in a row" to give the impression of fairness and to incentivize new people to start tagging tales. Unless you're resetting the list every month then it's quickly going to get to a state where one guy who tagged 100 tales in the first month doesn't have to do anything for the rest of the year and still has a good chance of getting the spotlight. And if you reset it every month that's a recipe for burnout if two guys tag 50 tales in the first month, the first one gets it, and the second one has to start from 0 again. I'm speaking in vague hypotheticals but only because I have no idea how this lottery is actually supposed to work.
Mythological-fiction and realism fall under a "know it when you see it" position from my point of view but I'm not opposed.
I believe Otherworldly needs that nuance to be included in its tag description because otherwise people will be confused by proper use. "takes place in another dimension, reality or universe. This would include stories in the genre of 'portal fantasy' or 'isekai'" is my suggestion.
We should have a third-person tag if we have the first person and second person ones. We already have a tag that functions as a standard-scp-format tag — "scp". "third person" is not the only set of writing that would be captured by not: first person and not: second person — it will also capture untagged works. It is also ridiculously easy to apply, so I feel the upsides outweigh the downsides.
Fine with the new set of "eligible to tag" rules with the stipulation that the definitions of the tags are as clear as possible. I think we should make it clear which team has the power to define who gets this right — Curation? — and how quickly they can change these eligibility criteria. If it turns out that 2 greenlights are in fact not enough, or a JS "goes rogue" and grants the ability to the entirety of the official Discord server as an open ongoing permission, obviously there should be a quick way to put a cap on that.
I think at some point we will need to continue a conversation on applying genre tags to GoI Formats and SCPs.
Here is my perspective:
Fundamentally, the SCP wiki is a writing site. The Wiki is a medium for telling stories. This is not, to my knowledge, a particularly rare opinion and I was able to find this example. I'll call this perspective form-agnostic — the Wiki is a place for stories. An informal(?) stance of the crit team is that the wiki is a place for stories, in the common advice that "all SCPs have a narrative", "all SCPs have a story". There is, from my point of view, little reason not to apply the "utopian" "otherworldly" tags to 6001, because people looking for a utopian and otherworldly story would want to read it. I think SCPs are stories and should, therefore, be tagged with classifications of their characteristics as stories.
This is just my opinion, and one that I know other users share.
There is another camp. This is a viewpoint that I am not personally equipped to defend because I do not agree with it and I may be creating, in full or in part, a strawman. The kind of viewpoint that holds SCPs apart from all other writing as something special and unique, as something that could still be mistaken for leaked government documents and should be treated as such. I think there are some comments that could reflect this viewpoint, but I can't say for sure because I didn't write them. Whatever the details, for some reason, and maybe I'm making a coalition out of hundreds of slightly different viewpoints, the view is that SCPs are not like other writing and should be treated specially because of it. And I guess that's true to some degree. When you read an SCP you have guiderails to go into the actual story but then at this point, with >7000 SCPs, there is a huge level of diversity of genre and presentation.
Ultimately, though these sentiments have shaped and led into the following fundamental assumption:
(The majority of) People come to the SCP Wiki to read SCPs.
My views follow from that.
Therefore, the site and its navigational elements should aid their in their journeys of discovery.
User-curated lists, many of which are delineated by genre, are heavily populated by SCPs. If someone comes to the SCP Wiki looking for a cosmic horror or fantasy or action story, odds are they came to read an SCP with those attributes. Now, I will admit I'm not fully familiar with the history of UCLs and to my knowledge tales could be on some other hub somewhere.
I understand that to some extent this project is to aid in tale navigation, which currently sucks. I think restricting it to tales would be shortsighted. I'm not as concerned with tale navigation and discoverability as site navigation and discoverability.
Sure, tales have less upvotes and we infer from that less reads. But maybe that's because our userbase doesn't want to read them. Maybe people don't read tales because they can't find them, or maybe they just don't want to read tales on the SCP Wiki.
My concern is that this is going to be a large expenditure of manpower and manhours on an endeavor that's ultimately secondary to what the readers actually want, when in my opinion it's actually a damn good proposal and a necessary next step for navigation.
Here is my proposal, since this is already going to require so much labor.
Currently, on average, SCPs have about 2.2x-2.5x the amount of upvotes as tales. This is a very rough number, very informal, very open to interpretation, and relies entirely on subjective taste as a measurement. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, Google Analytics is broken and we can't see pageviews effectively anymore so it is the best we have.
If, a year into the tale tagging operation or a year after hitting say 50% of all tales tagged (to account for lag), this multiplier significantly decreases within the tagged population — to, say, below 1.7x — then I will be happy to be proven wrong. However, if it remains roughly the same — say, anywhere above 1.7x — then I would say it would be reasonable to assume that the goal of getting more visibility on tales through tagging has failed and a pivot would be prudent.
Also, this proposal leaves GoI formats in the limbo of not being applicable for genre tags while also not being applicable for attribute tags. My personal view is that they should be eligible for both on a case-by-case basis but again that's out of scope.
