Staff Induction

For New Staff Members

Welcome to staff!

As of the writing of this paragraph, our staff documents are… a little bit of a mess. There's very few of them and those that do exist are strewn about on random hard-to-find 05 and mainsite pages, which has led to many new staffers getting confused about some relatively basic things or having no idea how to approach the more complex ones. This guide is meant to be sort of a handbook for you, where you can read what you think is necessary and skip whatever you think is uninteresting.

This first tab will tackle some stuff that every new staffer should know, so we'd recommend not skipping this one.

Staff Structure and You

So now you're part of staff, excellent, but what is staff? Staff is a collection of teams, each with its own goals and needs, that exist to serve and assist the experience of the SCP Wiki's userbase. Each team has a handful of captains who are responsible for making sure everything on the team is working properly, and a larger amount of regular staffers who are tasked with… whatever the team is tasked with doing. Sometimes, a team that's grown large enough will have its own subteams, who are just smaller teams inside the teams, typically with a "head" instead of a captain but the same general sentiment. If your team is unorganized enough, the subteams can have their own subteams like some sort of malformed internet hydra.

Example: We have the Internet Outreach team. As of the writing of this guide, the team's captain is UncertaintyCrossing, who handles the bigger calls the team makes while not necessarily taking part in all of the team's functions. The team is responsible for the various social medias the wiki has, and has a subteam for every social media (such as a Reddit subteam, Twitter subteam, etc.).

Along with the teams, we have ranks. Ranks don't mean much in practice nowadays so don't feel intimidated or worried about them, but here's what they are:

• Junior Staff: You are here. This is a temporary rank for when you're starting out on staff and are on a "probation" period.
• Operational Staff: Most of staff are here. This is just the normal staff rank.
• Admins: These are the Big Guys^TM. I would love to tell you what their specific role is, but it's kind of a mess, so generally assume that if you need something that's related to a fundamental functioning of the site or staff, these are the guys to ask.

"Ok, cool cool, but how do I stop being Junior Staff and move up these ranks?" Promotions. We have promotion cycles every few months, and if your captain thinks you've done a good enough job you can be put up for a promotion vote where the rest of staff say if they trust you enough to give you the higher rank. Frankly, the actual system of voting is less important, so if you're curious about this or want to be asked to put up for promotion just ask your captain.

Most importantly - staff teams aren't mutually exclusive groups, considering the majority of staff are on more than one team. If you see another team that needs help or you'd like to be a part of, you can just go up to the team's captain and ask to join. With only a handful of exceptions, there's a 99% chance that they'll let you right in.

What Should and Shouldn't You Care About

Now, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed; on 05command there's 500 threads at once, we have a ridiculous amount of teams, staff chat is harping on about the apocalypse every other day, etc etc. The important thing to remember is the following: While you can take part in almost everything, you don't have to engage with anything.

If you see a conversation you don't fully understand or don't really care about, that's fine, let someone else handle it. If you see an 05 thread that's too heated for you, you can just drop a short comment and not necessarily have to interact with it afterwards. Only participate as much as you feel comfortable, because there will be someone else who cares more.

On the other hand, we're not saying to do nothing but your assigned job. Do you see something you do care about and no one is doing? Just do it. Seriously, just open up a sandbox and get to work, even if it's not amazing. A half-done job is better than no job done at all. Something looks broken and no one is commenting about it? Ask someone what's up. You want to join another team? Send a message. You think someone is overdoing work? Tell them as such and maybe ask if you can help them. There is very little you will be told to not do no matter what, so just do stuff.

Do what gives you motivation, and don't do what you think is silly. As obvious as this advice may sound, people burn out all the time because they feel like they have to do everything. You are not gonna be the person who singlehandedly saves the site; if the site would die without you it'll die with you, so keep yourself afloat.

What Else Now?

Now, we recommend just doing what you came here to do. As a start just do the job of whatever team it is you joined, then start branching out to other teams or looking at policy, 05 threads, and so on and so forth. If you try to swallow everything at once it might be extremely ovewhelming, so take it at your own pace.

If you have questions about anything, feel free to reach out to your captain or anyone else on staff, we'll be glad to help.

Rights And Responsibilities

This is a summarized version of the staff responsibilities listed in our charter. If you are confused or want to read more into it, just check the charter.

(Note that our charter is a little out of date, so if some sections make no sense ask someone about them. Chances are we forgot to update them in literally 5+ years.)

Statuses

Each staffer can be on one of three statuses that describe their activity level: Active, Reserve, and Inactive, meaning Active, Semi-Active and Absent respectively. You can move between these statuses at will, but admins may move you around if it's deemed necessary.

• Active staffers are the default staffers. All the rules apply to them normally, they can vote and act, they have activity checks¹.
• Reserve staffers do not have activity checks anymore due to being less active, but also have less powers. Reserve staffers are expected to only be active in a few sectors of importance to them (acting as advisors), and this results in the following: votes they do need to be fully justified, but their vote does not affect quorum². They also cannot be a captain, and are expected to not be super active.
• Inactive staffers are fully inactive and do not participate in staff outside of emergencies. If an inactive staffer does anything in a staff capacity, they either need to stop doing that or not be listed as inactive anymore. If someone is inactive for more than six months, they're automatically retired.

Additionally, staff members are permitted (and expected) to take breaks from staff work. Depending on the length of your break, you may not need to report it to staff chat unless you are expected to complete staff work which may be an issue if not carried out.³ It is generally considered that breaks shorter than a week or two weeks do not need to be reported; however, it is recommend to check with your team captain(s) to understand their expectations.

Junior Staff limitations

As Junior Staff is meant to be a probationary position, there are a few things that Senior Staff⁴ can do that Junior Staff cannot.

• Junior staff are not able to vote on policy unless otherwise stated. Feel free to discuss it in the discussion threads and staffchat, though.
• Junior staff are not able to vote on deletions or witness summary deletions.
• Junior staff cannot remove images from new articles, as image policy enforcement is considered on the same level as a deletion vote.

Don't Fucking Do This

This is a list of things we expect staffers not to do, because… come on.

• Use your position to extort favors of sexual value⁵. This rule has no exceptions or wiggle room of any possible kind. Don't try it.
• Advertise being an SCP staffer on any platform where adult activity is expected or is the norm.

05, Staff Discord and actually getting policy passed

So - Policy. Policy is the catch-all term for the rules that govern staff and our site by extension. Policy is proposed by staffers, then looked over by other staffers, and after some discussion and a vote is typically put into action. Question is: How do you do it, and is it as intimidating as it sounds?

Firstly, don't be afraid to bring issues up. Policy's goal is to improve or fix parts of the site, so the important thing is to first discuss whatever it is you want to modify to see if other people have better solutions, or possibly don't see it as an issue at all. You can do this on 05command's Policy Discussion forum if you want a longer, more methodical discussion, or you can bring it up in staffchat if you want a more rapidfire "anything goes" discussion.⁶

Once you have the issue cleared up and a solution to solve it, time to write the actual Policy Proposal. A policy proposal is a post that brings up the issue in a concise manner, lists your suggested solution in a practical, actionable manner⁷, and then put it up for discussion for a certain period of time, typically a week.

If there are no objections after the timer ends - presto, your policy has passed, so proud of you. If there's discussion or disagreement, you can either pull the policy back and rework it, or bring it up to a vote in the Policy Votes forum.

Since this is a lot to do at once, we'd recommend asking someone who's been on staff longer (not necessarily an admin) to help you out with writing your first proposal. Additionally, on the practical side of things - the best way to make sure a policy comes to be is to be the one writing it down yourself. Again, don't overwork yourself, but if you have an idea you have passion behind and no one else is picking it up, make it happen by yourself.

Do I have to care

No, you can basically ignore this sort of thing and just do the work your team needs you to do, be it tagging or licensing stuff. You are allowed to comment, certainly, but if you don't care or don't have a strong opinion don't feel obligated to do so at all.

Counter-vandalism

You should be familiar with the "revert" ability Wikidot has, which resets a page's content to the state it was at in the past. It is the "R" button in the "history" view of a page, at the bottom. This allows resetting changes, either because a mistake was made, or vandalism is occurring (whether malicious or not).

Occasionally, the site gets spree vandals, who join and make as many bad faith edits as possible. Such users can be very disruptive when left unattended, so it is important to boot them as soon as possible. When such a person is plaguing the site you should flag them and ping all admins. Don't edit war with the vandal on a page (i.e. you revert their vandalism, they revert it back, etc), wait for an admin to remove them before you clean up everything.

How do you flag a user? It's not very obvious in the UI. If you click on a user module (e.g. Example) while on our site, you can "flag user as abusive":

You must be on the scp-wiki.wikidot.com site for admins to get the report. (Or on the sandbox if that's where they are being revoked / banned from.) If you do it from another site, the report will be discarded. You can access user profiles at https://scpwiki.com/system:user/[name], for instance https://scpwiki.com/system:user/aismallard.

To send reports on multiple sites, you must to to each site, open the modal, unflag as abusive, then reflag as abusive. Don't think of this as a toggle, it's a "send report" button. It "remembers" if you've sent a report before, but that might've been for a different site. I know, it's really confusing.

During an active vandalism incident, this is the easiest way for administrators to revoke or ban users (although you cannot enter a ban reason using the abuse flag method). Normally the ban modal is very slow (it takes about a minute per user normally).

This presents as a toggle, but it's actually a button. When set to true, it sends a report to the current site. To send another report (for instance to a different site), you must turn it off and on again.

Teams

MAST

MAST stands for Maintenance and Ancillary Staff Team.

Tagging

Ok, so you've probably seen the big complex tag guide here but here's a more digestible and understandable guide for when you start
also whenever you tag something make sure to add it to the tagging workbench so the tagging head can check it over to make sure it has all the appropriate tags, and eventually when the head tagger feels like you can tag more independently you won't need to add to it anymore. You'll need to join the MAST bee sandbox so you can edit the page.

We also have this page which is distinct from the MAST website tagging-workbench. the mainsite workbench lists all untagged pages which need to be tagged

Adult Splash Pages

Sometimes people post mildly NSFW stuff to the site. It's a thing that happens, and there's a subteam dedicated to its curation and making sure that all pages have the appropriate warnings on them. Sometimes they'll get to it before you even know it's there, but sometimes you gotta take matters into your hands when it's an obviously explicit page. Creating adult splashes is simple, first simply add the 'adult' tag to the page. Then, edit the page and add the component.

Obviously, not all pages will require all content warnings, so remove the ones you don't need and only keep the necessary ones. Make sure you edit the slugs and title of the current page too since those are important navigation elements. If you have any questions or doubts, please consult the adult content warning component page and the adult content warning guide for further instructions on how to apply the component.

Collaborative Pages

This is the team that maintains collaborative pages, which technically includes everything here. That said, most of these pages either have an author active to curate them, or are so old that people are no longer interested in adding to them, so they require no maintenance from us. The exceptions are mostly pages in the Hubs and Resource tabs (Canons, Facilities, GoIs, Characters, ect.), plus a few things like the 914 Experiment Log (which has its own sandbox and discord), the 682 Termination Log and the Logs of Anomalous Items, Events and Locations, which still get a decent number of new contributions. If you feel like you're discerning and unbiased enough to remove low quality entries from these pages, feel free to join the team. Note that you don't have to be a member of staff to add to these pages, they're tagged collaborative for a reason, but do come to the team if you have suggestions that go beyond simply adding to them.

Navigation

Navigation is basically responsible for everything that isn't collaborative but is still maintained by staff - the sidebar, topbar, mainpage, and a bunch of miscellaneous pages listed on the Navigation Hub. If you do have suggestions or strong opinions, or if you notice common complaints from other site members, feel free to bring them to Navigation. It may be something navigation is working on already, but on the other hand it could be something that's been overlooked.

Community Outreach

Licensing

Licenseboxes

You've probably seen the little text on some pages saying ‡ Licensing / Citation. That is a licensebox. Clicking it will open up a box with some lovely licensing information.

One of our goals as licensing is to have a licensebox on every page of the wiki, so knowing how to do these is essential. Here's a handy-dandy little guide for adding licenseboxes. It's a bit of a long read, but it breaks down just about everything you need to know. When you're starting out, you'll put all pages you've licenseboxed here, and once we're confident in your skills, we'll send you out on your own.

Criticism

Tech

This team is responsible for site theme and component approval, technical-related policies, miscellaneous maintenance, and tracking Wikidot problems. (Note that if you ever encounter Wikidot bugs, please report them in sensitive chat first, since it is not always obvious from the start whether it is an innocuous issue or a serious one.)

Footnotes

1. In theory.

2. Quorum is the term for "minimum amount of staff participation required in any given thing."

3. An example of this is the Sandbox Cleaning subteam of MAST, where staff members are expected to perform a “run” at a designated time.

4. Operational Staff and above

5. Actually; don't use your position to extort favors period. Don't be an asshole.

6. You don't have to only ask staffers, obviously. The more you ask users the better, although it's not required.

7. As in, a policy can't say "Team X will work harder" or "We will improve the site quality," since both are hard to measure and have no actual steps. Your proposal, even if not fully thorough, should have a clear line of implementation and a way to make sure it actually came to pass.