 Ahoy, ahoy, and welcome to the video. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about the 7K contest. Now there were, I'd say, three distinct quote-unquote problems with the 7K contest this time around, one of which turned out not to be as big a problem as I thought it was going to be, and another one which turned out to be a bigger problem than I thought it was going to be, and one that was kind of in the middle. So we'll start with a problem that turned out, well you know what, let's start sequentially, because this is the problem I thought that we were going to have before the contest started, and that was that the theme was luck. Now I know in western culture, at the very least, 7 and luck are very strongly associated, but first of all I thought that's far too narrow of a theme to really get any traction on. I thought people might have a difficulty with writing to that theme, but of course people ended up having absolutely no trouble writing to that theme, and in the end because luck is so tied to specific cultures, there was actually a lot of opportunity for multicultural sorts of works, so that was the first problem that turned out not to be a problem at all. The next two, I think, are problems, but I should preface this comment with the fact that I tend to write shorter articles. I believe the wiki is meant for shorter articles, and the longest I think that the stuff should be on the wiki is short story length, and we're running into novella length stuff now, and frankly any policies that I promote that would incentivize shorter works would only benefit me because that's where my, I think my wheelhouse is on scp writing, but regardless, we had a problem of length. I don't think anyone disagrees on the fact that we had too many entries and too long of entries. These are two separate problems that are intertwined, and they are seriously intertwined, because if you have a hunt, we had 120-ish entries with an average word count of 6,500, no it was 6,200 roughly. That's some back of the napkin math, but it's pretty accurate at this point. That is a lot. There were 750,000 words total to read, and at the end of the contest of over 10% of the next series was already full, and these problems are made much worse by the length of the voting period, and you might be like, how is that possible? Isn't the length of the voting period necessary, because it was about a month long? Isn't that necessary in order to get through 750,000 words on sort of a casual reader basis? And I agree with you, but it also incentivizes people to write longer works, because they have more of an assurance that people actually get around to reading them, and I know eventually people would always get to read these things, but if they knew that the contest voting period was short, there is a I really strongly believe there would be a push towards shorter works, because those are the ones you know people will be able to get through before the end of the actual contest period, and it is becoming a serious issue for the wiki. I also think that in the future beyond perhaps a shorter voting period to incentivize shorter works, we could probably work with teams, now I argue that if you had every if every entry had two authors or three authors or four authors, then it would be twice or three times or four times as few entries, I personally believe would probably be a little bit more than that, but the thing is those entries would be longer, but I don't think they'd be twice three times or four times longer. I really don't. I think when you put people together, they tend to create shorter works than two people would create separately. I think that's very simple and very easy to understand why that would be the case, but you know, I mean, because everyone's going to write their own containment procedures, they're going to go with their own description, their own this and the other thing, but if you're working together, then a lot of that stuff is doubled up, and you just, you know, even if you're working on separate sections, you're working on a section that is different, that is unique. So I think team contests and shortening the voting period. Now I should be very, very clear on two things beyond the fact that I work better with short works myself. So it would be benefited by this. I love team contests and collaboration projects. And secondly, more importantly, there was a time during this contest where I was actually the number one ranked article. I ended up being ranked eighth after about 30 days, I think of voting, something like that. And so it should be clear because I'm sure someone would work that out eventually that I'm actually suggesting shorter voting periods where I would have slid less farther down the list of entries and maybe placed in the top five or even top three or even stayed at the top. So yeah, these are all things that would benefit me. So I should be clear about that. But I also think that they would benefit the contest and they would make them more fun and easier to handle in general. Anyway, that's it. I wanted to put a video out today. We're going to go do our dank memes on Thursday and it's going to be a compilation of two different basically a whole month's worth of dank memes. I'm trying to get back into a Tuesday when Tuesday Thursday scheduling. I've got some stuff coming down the pipe, hopefully that will be enjoyable. But you're not going to see me on camera for a really long time, I think, except for maybe like casually, there's not going to be like me, no talking head stuff for a while, simply because I am not set up for it anymore because of the disaster that hit my recording studio, my room slash recording studio. But yeah, we will, we'll see you again on Thursday. And if you'd like to really help the channel, you can go over to patreon.com forward slash the Sumerian and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has including Synderiki and Christina Amos who have both pledged at $100 and I am about to go into my settings and change something so that it's only going to charge you when you pledge and then 30 days after that or the next month on the same date, I should say. So that because it used to be if you pledged now, it would charge you and then at the end of the month or at the beginning of the month, I should say it would charge you again. But there is new setting. I saw it. It says I can change that. So I'm going to change it. And yeah, thank you very much for watching and letting me know that I'm not alone out here. Hit the subscribe button. Come on. I'll see you all again on Thursday. I hope.