What's This All About?
It's simple.
<Aelanna> What if staff could vote to effectively immortalize a SCP?
<Aelanna> Ones such as 173. Remove them from the voting system entirely.
Mackenzie's proposal here is that staff have the ability, as a group, to vote to preserve SCPs on the mainlist without -ARCing them.
Why?
This would make these SCPs forever available for story use, which is not the case for -ARCed SCPs. (Nobody wants to use -ARCs for new tales or crosslinks, for many reasons.)
Another goal of this is to discourage downvote brigades. Why would an outside site organize a mass downvote on central SCPs if they know that we have officially protected them from deletion, or are at least willing to? And even if they do, it would be an exercise in pointlessness.
How?
Mann suggests that this "protected" - or, as Bright put it, "canonised" - status should have to be approved by a majority of staff in each case. For instance: three admins, three mods, and six Senior Staff would need to agree. (I would probably notch down the senior staff number, but that's me.)
Note, under current rules, we already could do this. We can vote against deletion til the end of time. We just don't exercise that privilege. This would make official an ability we already have.
Note also that we can still display a vote if we want. The page will simply no longer be vulnerable to deletion, unless staff decides to reverse the "protected" status at a later date.
Additionally, this status does not necessarily protect an article from edits. It just means that staff agree that 076, for example, will always be Able in some form.
Which Articles Does This Cover?
To start, this could cover mostly "heritage" SCPs. That is, SCPs that are already central to what we are as a site.
However, this proposed staff fiat is obviously flexible. If other SCPs become important to the site metastory - assuming we carry out the switch to encouraging metastory - and these get targeted by other sites, we can expand the fiat to include those SCPs as well if we so choose.
Where Does This Proposal Fit In With The Overhaul, Or Clef's Proposal?
This proposal could work as a supplement to Clef's proposal, or function as a partial replacement. Many alterations are feasible.
As it currently stands, this proposal does not fully address the concerns that Clef's proposal aims to address in its changes to the voting system. Mediocre-but-still-surviving-due-to-happenstance articles and any flavor of non-core article would likely not be covered by this, nor would it really affect the various popularity contest issues.
One potential alteration would be to expand this to be a right all Contributors have instead of taking away the vote from Members; Contributors could vote to prevent an SCP they have used in X number of popular stories from being deleted. Or, staff could just do that, but use the criteria of X number of popular stories to qualify.
Feel free to sound off and suggest any variations that might solve problems that come to mind.