 So, most of you know this already, but for anyone who doesn't, I've written a lot of articles for the SCP Wiki. Right now, I've got about 70 successful articles, and there's a thing that I don't do that most readers would associate with the SCP Wiki in a serious way. I don't censor anything. Now, none of my articles contain instances of black boxes, expungements, or redactions. I have two reasons for avoiding them. One is a lack of authenticity, and the other is about narratives. Now, I probably ought to address the authenticity first, since most people are going to find that a somewhat shocking claim. After all, early on in the science history, you'd see expungements in black boxes everywhere. Aren't they a part of what made the science seem real in the first place? Well, yes and no. I don't begrudge those early articles a bit, because they were written in a different time. Sometimes, literally. A document that was created in, say, 1993 would have been almost certainly physical, and that would have necessitated some black boxing. Over time, documentation has evolved significantly, and the SCP Foundation database today is widely considered to be more digital than physical. Certainly, this is true of anything that was discovered originally and contained after the mid-2000s. So, why is that important? Well, a digital document doesn't use black boxes the same way, a black box is where someone literally goes over the document and marks through certain sections, then photocopies the document, if they're smart, to make sure there's no physical evidence of what was under the black boxes. This implies anything that was originally a physical document that was scanned into the SCP database. It would, however, make a lot less sense for anything that was wholly digital. Beyond that, this is important to understand. Black boxes are the most noticeable and most honest versions of sanitizing a document. What do you mean by honest? Well, you can see very clearly on the page what was removed. And when a Freedom of Information Act request is processed by the US government, you may receive a document with a ton of redactions, so you know what it is you cannot know, which, by the way, gives you some intelligence. It means that it's okay for you to know what you can't know. Believe it or not, there's a certain level of analysis that goes that far into the meta of classification, because every single piece of information is valuable. So, why does it matter that it's a more honest version of classification? Because the SCP Foundation is under no obligation to be honest with you. And there are other ways to sanitize a document that will leave you with no evidence that anything was removed. So, instead of blackboxing or announcing an expungement, it simply eliminate any passages that contain the expungement, along with the context to figure out what's under it. By the way, that's a serious issue. Part of why some government documents are censored so much that it's impossible to figure out what they're even trying to communicate to the reader is that you could use context to figure out what was being censored. So, if you give me all of the number, except for the last digit, you're just being silly. And the other thing to remember is that in an authentic piece of digital documentation, a black box is rarely if ever used. And if it is used, it's usually a serious issue. NSA guidelines on redacting in digital documents are pretty specific about this. And I'll link you in the description so you can see for yourself. There were a lot of mistakes early on in the digital age where someone would take a Word document and just place a black box over the text and call it a day like it was a physical document. Because essentially the difference between physical copies and digital copies weren't really well understood. You know, like a typewriter, it leaves a physical impression on paper. So, if you just distribute the original version of a classified document with the sensitive materials marked out with marker, a determined adversary could look at that paper and understand what was under the marked out sections. So, you'd always photocopy the marked out version to remove some of the physical evidence of the classified passages. When using digital documentation, that's actually still a problem. You see, most good text editors retain something called metadata on your documents. Some of this is simpler stuff, like just the full text of the thing, including anything under the black box you placed. While other times it could be in edit history, so you have the classified material on the page and then you delete it out, your document still contains the original text. Because of those problems, if you're distributing a soft copy of material that has redactions, the most important thing you can do is delete the classified passages entirely. Now, there are further steps you can take to ensure that the metadata doesn't allow people to recall what's been deleted, but those are final steps. The first step you take is deleting the actual passage. And if that breaks formatting, you can insert meaningless text to preserve the formatting, but that's not really applicable to SCPs because it doesn't really break any sorts of formatting. Anyway, those are some of the reasons why it's not really authentic for digital documents, but let's talk for just a moment about why it harms your narrative. I'm going to take an example passage. Dr. *** has been the head of the *** project for *** years. During this time, he has overseen the containment of numerous ***. He is currently stationed in *** as part of a renewed foundation effort to defeat *** there. And now we'll try it without the censorship. Dr. Jackson has been the head of the Extrateran Project for seven years. During this time, he has overseen the containment of numerous ***. He is currently stationed in *** as part of a renewed foundation effort to defeat the alien invasion there. Which of those versions actually progresses a narrative and inspires you to wonder about what's really going on? Now, if it's the first one, I, you know, maybe there's no hope for you, but I'd wager that most people find the second version to have more potential, despite the fact that there are a lot of very specific details included. Now, none of this is to say that censorship is always automatically bad. There will always be instances where it makes sense. I've never found one for any of my documents, but I've seen it most of the time. It doesn't make sense. Give us place names, give people's names, give real numbers, make your story internally consistent without relying on black boxes to clean up the bits that make no sense. And if you absolutely must use them, don't let them take away from what you're trying to communicate to the reader. Above all else, make them authentic, because that's 90% of the reason why you want to use them in the first place. If you liked the video, you should subscribe so you can see more videos you like. Start a conversation in the comments if you want to talk more about classification. I'm open to other opinions. And follow me on Twitter, at Decimarian. That's all. Thanks for watching.