This is a policy proposal to radically restructure the Disciplinary Team of the SCP Wiki.
Problem
The Disciplinary Team has been caught in a mire of dysfunction for a long time now. The role of Captain has been vacant for nearly two years, and the role of Vice Captain was functioning as Acting Captain until mid-2023, when that also became vacant. Since then, the two leadership roles in the team have been empty, and along with other factors like near-constant high-complexity cases and a poor drive for recruitment, have contributed to a slow but clear decline in team function. Cases are missed, reports are taken and not followed up on, actions are decided upon but then no one executes them; the lack of leadership means that there is no central figure making sure things are done and that admins/other teams are kept in the loop.
Additionally, the Disc team is operating on a mandate that is suited to the era where the only offsite space was #site19. As it stands, Disc simply has no actual authority to deal with anything that does not occur on the SCP Wiki itself — which seems reasonable, until you register that most community interaction exists in public Discord servers, some of which are official, some of which are not. If someone has a dispute in a major public SCP server where, for example, they use a slur, Disc has no ability to deal with it, and is forced to send it over to the only team that does have a mandate extending offsite — Anti-Harassment.
This is bad for staff, because now the lines between the teams are growing muddled, and it’s bad for users, because AHT’s much broader power is supposed to be matched with a much smaller scope — they aren’t supposed to handle standard rule breaks, only personal harassment of users. Due to the nature of the harassment they are meant to handle, AHT generally also does not discuss matters with all involved users, make public records, or notify the community of ban specifics — all things users deserve to get when they make or are the subject of a Disc complaint. De facto, Disc’s authority already extends offsite (for example, someone can be banned for inciting a brigade in a Discord), but in a jagged, inconsistent way that has happened piecemeal over a decade, and needs to be standardized.
Solution
The issues with the Disc team are systemic and structural; the lack of mechanisms for someone to take charge of cases and lack of new people coming in completely neuter the team’s ability to actually enforce the Site Rules, and the limited mandate means that most rulebreaks can’t be prosecuted effectively anyway. To that end, the team has discussed a radical restructuring, consisting of three components.
I. Captaincy Restructure
- The roles of captain and vice captain will be abolished.
- They will be replaced by two new roles, to be called Duty Captain and Special Captain.
- Pre-emptively, these roles are to be filled by OriTiefling and AriadnesThread, respectively; in the future, when a vacancy arises, administrators will fill the vacancy with all due haste.
- Each will also pick a vice captain, but the vice captain has no prescribed duties beyond simply filling in when their respective captain is unavailable or indisposed.
- The Duty Captain will dedicate their attention to daily duties of the Disciplinary Team — revokes and bans of trolls, spammers, Rule 0 violations, logging of actions, the day-to-day work that needs to be done. They can focus on these common but low-complexity matters, leaving the Special Captain free to focus on their mandate.
- The Special Captain will dedicate their attention to particularly complex or delicate cases involving high-profile community members and PAIs, cases that demand a thought-out approach and beyond-thorough investigation. They can focus on these uncommon but high-complexity matters, leaving the Duty Captain free to focus on their mandate.
- Beyond their leadership roles in team function, the Duty and Special Captains have no decisionmaking capacity beyond that of regular team members; their votes count the same as any other member. Should they believe a change to team function is in order, either is empowered to take up the matter with the administrative team.
The reality of the Disciplinary Team is that 50% of the work comes from 90% of the cases: the standard, daily banality of revoking spammers, vandals, trolls, et cetera. The other 50% of the work comes from the other 10%: relatively infrequent cases that involve a number of high-profile community members often making Disciplinary complaints about each other, or whose behaviour crosses the line in some way that means the Disciplinary team cannot blindly make a call and leave the consequences for later. Having one person as the Captain handling 100% of these cases is a recipe for burnout — they can’t focus on the first class of cases because of the second, and they can’t focus on the second because of the first. Splitting it up distributes duties across the two new captains evenly and allows them to handle their business effectively.
II. Mandate Change
- The list of duties on the Disciplinary Team hub are to be changed to include:
- Delivering warnings and disciplinary actions on the SCP Wiki on members who break the Site Rules on the Wiki, or break basic Site conduct rules in private messages with other Wiki members, and in major Wiki community spaces.
- Additionally, the Site Rules are to be changed to include:
- § 0: Rule 0: We expect you to behave in a reasonably civil, mature, and non-disruptive way on the SCP wiki and in major SCP Wiki community spaces.
- § VI: Unacceptable Offsite Behaviours: Your behaviour in private with other Wiki members and in major SCP Wiki community spaces (such as large public Discords) reflects on your presence on the wiki. If your behaviour is found to egregiously violate the Site Rules, you may be subject to disciplinary action on the SCP Wiki in response. See also the Anti-Harassment Policy.
- Major Wiki community spaces are defined as those that fit the following criteria:
- Publically-accessible.
- Primarily related to or focused on discussion of the SCP Wiki.
- Frequented by users of the SCP Wiki.
This formalizes Disc’s ability to ban people from the site should they, for example, yell racial slurs in an unofficial but major Discord frequented by authors, or private message insults to a user with whom they had a dispute — a clear violation of the community standards, but one that at the moment we have no legal power to punish beyond sending to AHT.
This does not grant Disc the authority to force moderators of that Discord to punish or ban the user in question — it only gives us the right to account for offsite actions when we make decisions about whether they should stay on the Wiki or not. Major Wiki community spaces are not the Wiki, and the Disciplinary Team has no authority to make moderation decisions on their behalf.
III. Process Changes
- The Duty Captain is to implement a system to keep track of open cases and allow team members to easily determine and change the status of a case.
- The specifics of this system are to be determined later and by team consensus; various ideas include a bot, enterprise task-tracking software such as Jira, or Discord forums.
- The Special Captain is to remain in close contact with both the administrative team and the Anti-Harassment Team to determine that complex cases are being handled with all discretion and cases are not being forgotten when passed between the teams. AHT is to inform the Special Captain when they have decided on a ban for a user, so as to not interrupt a Disciplinary case in progress, and vice versa.
This change is largely to re-orient the team on the path of productivity, reducing the possibility of cases ‘falling between the cracks’ or otherwise getting lost as they have.
The Disciplinary Team believes that these changes, bundled together, will structure the team to alleviate the current dysfunction and allow the Site Rules to be effectively enforced on the community again.
This discussion will go on for seven days!