 SCP-173, what can we say about it? Well, one, I think most people, regardless of their opinions on the content of the wiki today, would probably agree that 173 is not a very well-written article, which is fine. It was written in 2007, specifically June 22nd, 2007, as a post on 4chan, and that's it, and it was picked up and copied and pasted It was a copy-pasta. It was copied and pasted over and over and over again, and eventually found its way about a year later, without the original author's really approval or permission at the time, on the SCP wiki itself. At least as far as I know. The original author didn't really get involved or understand what was going on until much later. At the very least, when it was being passed around, he may have learned about it when the wiki went up, but when it was being passed around in that between time, it basically was just a forgotten thing that he had posted once and then disappeared. The image used in the original post is from a piece of art, a sculpture specifically, by Izumi Kato. I could be pronouncing his name wrong. I think I sometimes get corrected in comments whenever I use this name. Called Untitled 2004, which means obviously it was an untitled piece that was created in 2004. Well, not necessarily, but in this particular case it seems to be true. So, what we have is posted to the wiki, essentially without the knowledge of the original author, a piece that's not very good, that's based around an image that was taken from literally stolen from an artist and which the core concept is based around a Doctor Who episode. You don't know that it was based around the Doctor Who episode. A lot of people set a lot of people on the wiki who were around that time. Even though it was 14 years ago, almost a decade and a half now. We'll say that, oh no, it came first. I'm pretty sure I saw it on 4chan several months before the Weeping Angels came out. There's a catalog of posts from I think it's 2006-2008 from 4chan. That's basically every post that was put up as an archive and you can search it. And the earliest version of SCP-173 is June 22nd. So, again, you have something where the concept isn't original. It's not particularly well written. It uses a stolen image and the core text was just taken, lifted and put onto the SCP wiki, essentially originally. I should say originally because the author came back later and gave permission. But originally, without the author's knowledge even. So, despite this fact, it's considered a sacred cow amongst SCP wiki aficionados. And I have strong opinions about 173. Not necessarily about the quality of it. There are bad articles in series one that are quite popular. And you know what? That's fine. The problem I have with it is the amount of stealing going on in its origination and it's moving to the SCP wiki. Honestly, there's not a whole lot that can be done about that. I mean, let's just say late 2000s attitudes towards intellectual property. We're not nearly as evolved as they are now. And you'll still find plenty of people will be like, well it's on the internet. Doesn't that mean it's free? Despite the fact that literally anyone can post anything on the internet, including somebody else's stuff. Which is exactly what happened here, by the way, twice. But the SCP wiki in recent times, mostly because I think there is a certain amount of... Well, first of all, it's sort of a moral issue. When people post stuff to the wiki that's stolen, that's and you allow it to continue and become popular. That's on you at that point. Especially when you do have some level of curation available to you, or should say curation tools available to you. And that's just deleting the content off of the wiki, which is a thing that they do. Which, by the way, safe harbor provisions for online... When you become a curator of content, you start to lose some of your protections against copyright claims against you for other people posting stuff on your site. If you specifically curate that content for other reasons, because if you can curate it for quality, or theft, or any other number of reasons, then you could conceivably also curate it for copyright. Which is another reason why modern SCPs and SCP content, I would think anyway, do a very into a lot to ensure that content put up on the SCP wiki isn't stolen. However, SCP 173 again is treated as though it's an exception to these rules. The content itself is heavily borrowing from a Doctor Who episode and the article's image, which the rest of the art, the only original parts of it is the statue, which isn't original, right? The idea of a statue that moves when you... The concept is a statue that moves when you don't look at it, stolen from Doctor Who. The execution of that is this particular statue, and it, you know, does this and it moves around. And even the setting of the image allows for some of the anomalous abilities of SCP 173, where the ground underneath it is going to be filling with blood and feces, which makes it hard to clean and invokes a lot of other story opportunities. But even that is taken from the photograph, which wasn't the authors in the first place. Everything, except like just the only thing about SCP 173 that isn't stolen, and still isn't particularly original, is the concept of the SCP Foundation itself. The idea that there is some organization, and this is the 173rd item that they have contained, that developed the entire SCP Wiki from it. And without SCP 173, I'm not gonna say this very clearly, without SCP 173, the SCP Wiki would not exist. So I am thankful in that respect that it is a thing, because I mean this is what I do, right? And I've written for the SCP Wiki quite a lot, you know, almost 120 articles later, and I'm like, okay, yeah, obviously I'm invested in this, but the original article does not need to remain on the SCP Wiki itself in order for that to remain true. And that's where we come down to the idea of what would happen if you just delete, first of all, let's take a look at it from a step-by-step basis. What if you just deleted the image out of SCP 173? Would the article be substantively worse? And I think the answer to that is pretty clearly no, because the article is so bad in the first place, it can't get much worse. Secondly, if you just deleted the whole thing off of the Wiki, and took all this equivocating about whether or not the content is stolen or not, and pretending that the, forget the image for a second, which is clearly stolen, and there's actually licensing information on the page itself to define it, but if we go back to the actual content itself, the staff pretending that it wasn't stolen from Doctor Who as a concept, which isn't a problem, by the way. A statue that moves when you're not looking at it is a huge deal. Like, it's just not very original. Let's put it that way. But it is, hmm, what's the best way to put this? It is very troubling when people see that who are in power on the SCP Wiki staff and say to themselves, yeah, but our idea predates that, just to make themselves feel a little bit better about the concept. Not everyone does it, but plenty of people do. I have talked to full-on staff members, administrators, currently, who still will hold the idea that SCP 173 was posted to 4chan before the Weeping Angels episode came out. Despite the fact that there is absolutely no proof of that, and every single shred of evidence points to June 22, which is two and a half weeks after that episode released, June 22nd being the time that this article went up first. I don't mind it, but I'm just saying that maybe people need to be a little bit more honest with themselves. Now with all of that said, if you remove the article from the Wiki, the SCP Wiki isn't going to fall, it's not like an ocean and a plug that you pull out and suddenly the ocean goes away. The ocean's going to remain regardless. I'm sorry, that's just the truth. The SCP Wiki would survive the deletion of SCP 173, and I think, I'm not entirely sure I would advocate for its deletion, but I think it's a reasonable thing to think about. Does the SCP Wiki want to continue, and there's a legal angle to this too, want to continue to have to worry, and they do have to worry, about someone out there using SCP 173 in a commercial work that becomes very popular and the creator of it is litigious enough and has the money to back that up to take them to court over it, because if they do, they really don't have much standing to actually protect the work. They act like they do. They file takedowns for SCP 173 images, by the way, but they're not truly empowered by Izumi Kato to do that. They're just doing it because they know if they don't, Izumi Kato may withdraw his permission, which he could do at any time. I think the better solution is to just cut your losses and delete the article, and just continue on. The SCP Wiki's going to remain, it's fine. Hold on to the concept, get rid of the rest of the stuff, and acknowledge it. Don't forget about it, by the way. Acknowledge where we came from, but you don't have to keep it up on the Wiki and keep that liability in place for forever. It's silly that they do it, to be honest with you, but I don't think I'm going to change any minds by saying that out loud. Anyway, that's it. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you all again on Tuesday.