 Recently, the site has been rolling out a collection of SCP international articles. These articles have been translated from the various foreign language branches and then posted the SCP Wiki itself. They are being posted to main slots, mind you, but rather as a separate sort of thing. The general sense from the main site so far is that this rollout has been lackluster. And today I want to talk about some of the problems and how I think future types of projects in the same vein could be done better. So first of all, before we talk about solutions, let's talk about what the issues are and I'm going to stay away from my own opinions for a moment before I can back them up with some facts. Now, there is data for this because the rollout of the international articles was in mostly October. And I can use that as a useful place to grab data. I'm comparing all the international articles to every tale and then separately I'm going to compare them to the every SCP written in the month of October. Out of every article posted in October, there are 99 tales that have survived. There are 91 SCPs that have survived so far and finally 47 SCP international articles. Now sure, that's about twice as many of both the SCP and tales as there are international articles, but I think this is a big enough sample size to get reasonable averages. Of course, the choice to make international articles a separate category kind of relegates them to second class articles, but we'll discuss that at another time. What it does mean right now is that we can compare them to other categories. So first of all, how the international articles fared against the average posted SCP, because these are mostly SCP articles. Well, the average SCP in October reached a rating of plus 32. And this is pretty low by most standards of success for an SCP, but SCPs are a little different than most other types of content. They tend to grow in rating over time, since the listings of SCPs is the main reason people come to the site in the first place. The SCP international articles reached an average, at least as of right now, of plus 21. That's a differential of 11 points. But in comparison to an SCP rating, that may not be favorable, but it's plausible that this may tick up a little in the coming months, as some of the lower rated articles end up getting deleted off the site. But that's not actually all that great when we're talking about success or not. And still, perhaps comparing them to SCPs is unfair. They are, after all, being treated as a separate category like tales. So we're going to compare them to the redheaded stepchild of the SCP wiki. When we do that, we find that the tales of October are averaging plus 22. That's a differential of just one. But that means that SCP international articles are actually achieving lower ratings on average than tales, which are generally understood to be overlooked and underappreciated. And I should note this is actually during the introductory outing of the project. So visibility of international articles is almost certainly at its highest point that it will ever be. Outside of the prevailing opinion of the user base, who I have talked to in length about this, that this was a very poor outing. What went wrong? Well, I think one of the first problems is first impressions. And there were some exceptional international SCP articles posted, but one need only look at the numbers to understand that most of the project's limited success came from just a few of the 12 international branches. If we look at the ratings of the various branches' contributions, it's not at all an equitable distribution. The top three international articles over the last month by rating are all Japanese articles. And in fact, those three Japanese articles are the only ones that are higher rated than the international hub. Now, if we look at those numbers, the Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and French branches appear to be the only ones finding any substantive success on the SCP weekend. For a few of those, that's really very mediocre success that they're seeing. At this point, I'd like to recall an observation I made of a now deleted article from the Spanish wiki. One or two individuals were pointing out, after the piece received some substantial critique and useful critique, I thought, how the article was an example of a classic article in the Spanish wiki. And we have classic articles here as well. In fact, some of them suck pretty bad. The one article I will always tend to refer to when talking about this is SCP 343. I use it as an example because there are people who enjoy series one and series two and series three and series four and series five independently of the others. People who are fans of this type of article or this other type of article. But almost everyone seems to be able to agree that SCP 343 is not necessarily one of the best examples of writing on the site. But even with that being understood, it's still pretty highly rated, being over plus 500 at this point if I remember correctly. But you know what, if I'm introducing someone to the wiki, I'm not going to show them classics like SCP 173 or SCP 343, because they don't really intro you to the site very well. And in fact, kind of set you up to expect lower than average quality out of the works of the site. And yet a wide swath of the posted international articles were closer to what they consider classics for their site than good articles. By the way, understanding that there's a difference between classically successful and good can actually be a very important bit of self-awareness. And this was really a problem of understanding our audiences. Some newer writers will when called out for their article subpar quality compare it to successful but poorly written series one articles. Articles which were written 10 years ago. Not understanding that the wiki has changed in the interim is a failure of observation, and I genuinely believe the branches that saw little to no success have articles that could survive and thrive here, but we didn't get to see those articles. And sadly, you really only get to make one first impression, so now those branches will have to fight back against a prevailing notion that they produce in general substandard works. Because this was supposed to be an example of their best works. And I think that's unfair to them, but I don't see a way around it. Secondly, I think the pace of the release was a problem which was partly connected to the timing of the release. I imagine this project's been in motion for a long time and the organizers could not have predicted that there'd be a site contest and a highly popular unofficial contest running concurrent to their release schedule. But once they did notice it, I'm surprised they didn't decide it was best to stop posting and wait it out. Instead they just stuck to their schedule. And this was compounded by their releasing two articles a day. Maybe on a normal month, two articles a day would have been okay. But on a month when there was a very high volume of articles being released, in fact, there were about eight articles every day that survived in the month of October. And I guarantee you there were at least eight more that didn't survive. What that meant was that the international project was often ignored in lieu of other site content. And that means lower averages, because if no one reads your work, they can't rate it. And third, I think there was a problem of quality control here. Now, I've not been quiet about my opinion on these articles, but I was actually stopped by someone over on the French Wiki and asked point blank why I downvoted. Now, that's generally kind of poor etiquette, but I mean, I'm not really all that bothered by it. It was from someone from an international branch who may have different standards for that sort of thing. But that question is part of why I decided to make this video. And I'm not going to name and shame anyone, nor will I dive into the critique I gave that individual. But I will say that the majority of international articles have elements that are very strongly seen as artifacts of a Series 1 style by the by. Series 1 isn't a bad style to emulate, but there are some bad habits you can get into if you go into it too deep. There's things like overly prescriptive containment procedures, like saying that something must be kept in a containment chamber of a particular size, even when that size is not important to keeping it in containment. You don't need to keep an object in a 10 by 10 by 10 cell. If a 10 by 10 by 11 cell will work just as well, you can say standard containment cell. And let the site director or the project director decide the best use of space here. There's also the problems of overdoing censorship. Now, most of you who have been on this channel for a long enough time understand that I don't like censorship at all, but I can understand that is a stylistic choice. And in some places it can work without really doing too much damage to your article. Whole paragraphs of black boxes or expunging information that is easily figured out is really what I'm talking about here. You can't have whole paragraphs of black boxes that generally doesn't work except for like one or two articles on the site. And beyond that, it becomes repetitive and it becomes useless as a tool. And when you expunge information that's easy to figure out, you pull the reader out of your work instead of immersing them, which is what your censorship is supposed to do in the first place. And finally, there was a lot of very awkward phrasing. And that last thing, by the by, is the most easily fixable. All they had to do was have a native English speaker go through every draft and fix those problems. Now, I know what you're thinking, that may be up to 60 articles, but that's what this project was supposed to be about. And now, if someone actually did go through those and that's what came out the other end, I'd say they did a mostly bad job. And if no one did that, then someone else did a really bad job, but for entirely different reasons. Now, ultimately, I came away from most of the international articles with what I think is an unfair view of most of the international branches. And for most of the conversations I've had with both writers and fans, I've found that I'm not alone in this evaluation. I said it earlier and I'm repeating it now to drive the point home. This is unfair to those international branches and this project has done a disservice to them because I am sure that they have produced some brilliant works in their native languages and we didn't get to see them. Anyway, if you want to see more content like this, please hit the subscribe button and click the notification bell next to that. You can follow me on Twitter and keep up to date with the channel's content and progress at D. Sumerian. And if you want to support this kind of content, you can find me at patreon.com forward slash D. Sumerian. Thanks for watching.