 Ahoy, ahoy, and welcome to the channel. Normally today we would do a dank memes video where I would go over funny memes from the SCP community, however, unfortunately, there is an important piece of news that I should cover and I should cover it now while it's still relevant. And unfortunately, there's no way to cover that important piece of news without also covering an incredibly annoying piece of drama at the same time. So we're going to do that, but first we'll talk the news and then we'll talk about the drama that has sourced out of that news. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor. Let's get started. So there's no way to talk about this without at least first acknowledging a single piece of thing. One of the most prolific authors on the SCP wiki to this date was a user by the name of Roger. Now I've always said Roger and I think a lot of other people called him Roger, but it's because it was in text and it was ever spoke over voice on a regular basis. A few of us had different opinions on the proper pronunciation. I believe it should have been Roger. I was the idiot. So anyway, you're going to hear me say Roger. That's who I'm talking about. And I'll put the name on the screen so you can see it. Roger was when I say one of the most prolific authors on the wiki, it's important to realize that like the top 10 authors of which are happened to be one of them. If you want to look up the numbers represent a huge sizable percentage of the total articles on the wiki, the top 10 probably represent maybe a full 10% of the wiki's author articles, if not more, when we're only talking about 10 out of like a couple thousand authors. So yeah, individually, we represent quite a lot of works, which means that when one of us leaves the community or stops writing, there is usually I mean, like it's going to be replaced. There's always new people coming in, of course, but there's a precipitous drop off in production. There's always there's got to be because you're losing one of the most prolific people and those people represent a large number of your activity. Roger represented a huge portion of the wiki's content. And in fact, I believe I haven't run the numbers myself in a long time. There was a time and I don't know how much they had or he had posted in that time or how much the wiki has grown since then, but there was a time for sure where Roger's contributions represented a full 2% of the wiki's content, one out of 50 articles. If you went through 50 articles, the likelihood is one of them was written by Roger. And this is a long way of saying basically that we're talking about a user with a huge amount of reach. And that is important because on the 16th of February, they edited a post on an author page. Okay, so we actually have to cover something else here. Roger has transitioned. So from now on in this video, when I refer to them, not in a historical sense, but just in general, I will be using their new name, which is their new username anyway, which is Harmony. I believe it's pixelated Harmony, but they asked me to use the name Harmony. And they now use she, her pronouns. So that is what I will be using from. I'll do my best. I've known them for a very, very, very long time. I don't I'm going to, if I make a slip up, I will try to correct it. And Harmony made an edit to an author post because they actually created a new account to leave the old name behind on their new author page. And that new author page edit covered something of particular import to the community. I'm going to read as much of it as I can. It's a quite a long post here, but it's important that we cover the cover the text here. Today is the end of my involvement with the community. But I hope not all the people of SCP, if I'm dear to you, do not be afraid to find me. I am not far away, but I cannot be here any longer. My masterpiece was the last story I had to make. And if anybody would like to finish the computer chronicles or any of the other drafts I started in this short second act, I make all material in my sandbox available to be used as you see fit. I would like to request that Dr. Rodgett's personal file, any nonfiction material, accepting for all of my contributions to HOTUS and all original primary source materials I created, such as the interview with the administrator and the files attached to some of those pages. And all of my SCPs be deleted from their current places on the SCP Wiki immediately. The same for the tales. Everything I posted under the account name rjb underscore r, which is the the wiki dot lets you change your name and the old Rodgett account was changed to rjb underscore r and not applying to that, which I wrote using this account about which I am requesting nothing other than they be treated the same as anyone's work. To be clear, don't delete anything listed on Pixelated Harmony's author page. In addition, I would like the author attribution, which I have on all collaborations, to be extinguished and authorship rights to my rewrites restored to their original authors or assigned as modern Erasmus sees fit. Do not delete anything I wrote in Conwell's collaborations, my pictures on Troy's author page, contribution to Gears Day and Leveritas can have new tech issues if he wants it. The living will, which was something that he posted or she something that she posted on Dr. Rodgett's personnel file, which was the old author page for this user, is no longer valid. I bequeath all the deleted content, which I no longer wish to have associated with my name to the SCP community at large, to be remixed and revitalized as they see fit. I would like a neutral space not owned by anybody in the community to be created to accommodate this public material or that an existing one, like GitHub or Pasteboard, or another site not controlled by any one person or WikiDot, all of their details, however, the executors of this action see fit. Any author may post my words of the wiki again as they were, which is true, legally they can, but please don't. I would personally take that as a slap in the face and seek you out to hold you accountable for it on an individual basis. So don't make me do that. I'm trying to make a clean break. OK, well, if you say I'm going to come find you, that's not really that's not if you literally say, do this and don't do this, or I'll find you, you're not making a clean break. That's not what any of those words mean. If you could be like, don't make me hurt. That almost seems like this person's like, don't make me hurt you. Anyway, I do not wish for a credit to get accreditation other than the bare minimum in terms of credit and how many places it is placed in. Wait, I do not wish for a credit accreditation other than the bare minimum in terms of credit and how many places it is placed in that it is technically required by law. I'm reading this straight text. That's a I'm not really sure what that's supposed to mean other than maybe I don't want anything other than the legal minimum of credit in the places where it is required, which is everywhere on every article, which you just asked to have your names removed from. I hope that everybody enjoys all of the empty slots. Nothing would make me happy to know that you filled them with articles that made you happy to write to replace the things I wrote for outside validation because I couldn't feel happy by myself. Let that be my final legacy of that. You see that unique number next to others you have and will write that you think of me and we all have accomplished together in the next decade and all we have accomplished together in the next decade and the one going on after that and on and on until the sun sets. Never forget the foundation will always be for everybody. Think of your time. I had the time of my life, Harmony, formerly Roger, your eternal friend and admirer. Now, where did we? How did we get to here? All right, that's the better question. When pixelated Harmony began writing for the site, it didn't go smoothly. There was a lot of problems with mistagging posts, cold posting articles, and there's nothing wrong with it. When we talk about cold posting, that's posting an article without getting any feedback. And I was told this by I talked to some staff members, a variety of them, and I looked and some of this is definitively true enough of it that I don't and none of it's particularly controversial. There is a lot of poor quality works being posted that weren't really feedbacked, didn't see or if they were or whoever gave that feedback was not doing a very good job. And then there was a particular post on a user called Mouse's... A user called Mouse wrote a redaction guide, kind of an updated one, and there was a very, very strong post made on that. I can, let me see if I can find it real quick. All right, so we're gonna read this is sort of the trigger. Like there was a lot of things that led up to this, this is the eventual trigger for the, at least revocation. There wasn't even a ban, it was just revoked, they were just had their account revoked where they'd have to reapply, which is supposed to be sort of a wake up call. That's really all it does. It's like, it's just a bit over a warning. A warning would just be don't do it again. A revocation makes you literally like stop and be like, I have to reapply to the site now. This led to that revocation. Actually, let's double check because we have to look at the original edits here, like Jesus, okay. This is a terrible guide. What kind of creative writing side are we? That we celebrate something that spits on our core values in favor of deifying pedantry. There's not a single word here that isn't telling people how they're allowed to think and nothing about how they can use an iconic SCP visual element in new creative or interesting ways, instead urging them not to even consider the tool and throw it directly into the trash, which is something that I always suggest to people to do when it comes to redactions, that's to be fair. A complete waste of the author's misguided effort, of a good author's misguided effort and the worst guide or essay on the wiki. So that was the original post. That was edited multiple times. Oh, there's more lines. Man, there were, oh, Jesus. This looks like 20 or so revisions. The final one is like the final revision, which was made. Wow, okay. So it went from 944 to 1052. Wow, that's a lot of editing. Actually, to be honest with you, the final arguments that they made, I'm not gonna bother reading that a whole thing again, because it's basically a whole new post, are not probably actionable, doesn't look actionable to me, but the first one is definitely in violations of feedback rules, because yeah, that's very personal. The thing is, this led to the revocation, which was supposed to be a wake up call sort of warning sort of situation. Instead, things began to spiral from there and the user eventually went to the point where they asked to have all of their works removed from the wiki within six hours of that post after the revocation happened. Okay, so here we are. We're looking at one of the most prolific users on the wiki asking to have their works deleted. How does the wiki respond? The answer to that is poorly. There, I really do feel, I'll say this, because I'm pretty sure that Pixelated Harmony is gonna be watching this at least once. I would really doubly ask that you not, I can only ask, but I very much ask that you reverse course on the request you made to have your works deleted from the wiki. None of them are particularly popular. I'll make that argument all day because there's a lot of people who tell me, like, we can't delete them. They're so important to the wiki. You know this, none of your works are particularly popular on the wiki, but that doesn't mean that there's not value to them, right? And it's not all about the numbers. You talked about this before. It's not all about the numbers, right? Just because they're not particularly popular doesn't mean they're not important to a lot of people. I mean, it's not gonna kill, it's not gonna hurt the wiki to delete them. I think it's gonna hurt you, not necessarily that. I think it will hurt your legacy more than anything else. And I think it's sad that it has come to this, but I'm just gonna make that plea, like change your mind, please. That's all I can ask. But if you don't, and now we're going to cover the other half of this problem, the Creative Commons license, and now I'm talking to everybody again, the Creative Commons license allows you to remix and redistribute a work indefinitely. As long as you redistributed under the right license with the right attribution, okay? So any of Pixelated Harmony's works can be copied and reposted by somebody else, legally. Now we're not talking about moral imperatives here or any of those sorts of things. Legally, they're fine. I feel like morally that's a little bit on the shaky side. But the Creative Commons license does not give other people control of the works you individually created. And there's a stupid distinction here. It allows you to create new copies of that work. But the originals that you created, like if I'm holding up the piece of paper, I own this. And for the Wiki, the posts that Pixelated Harmony made under the old username, they own those posts and have every right in the entire world to have them taken down. And the Creative Commons license does not grant you ownership of the actual thing, grant you ownership of the content of that thing to then be reposted. It seems like a silly distinction, right? What it means is that I'm holding this piece of, I'm gonna give you this as an analogy. I'm holding a piece of paper with a piece of flash fiction, a one-page piece of flash fiction. I own this piece of paper. I can burn it if I want to. But if you read that story or take a picture of that story or copy down that story and then recreate it and make sure, and we're assuming this piece of paper and this story is under a Creative Commons, unless otherwise indicated, this work is under a Creative Commons share-alike 3.0, I'm sorry, a 3.0 share-alike attribution license and was written by Dr. Sumerian or my real name, depending on what you wanna use. I own the paper. I can burn it. I should have the option to burn it. And if you take it away from me, I still own it. And if I say, hey, burn that for me, you can either give it back to me, give me access back to it or burn it. You know, give me access back to it to do it myself or burn it yourself. And then you can create as many copies as you'd like. It's a stupid distinction, but legally that is a distinction for what you can and can't do. Unfortunately, the SCP Wiki has worked on now on the assumption that they just own everything on the Wiki. And when I say they, I mean, I don't know who they're talking about. Cause like, they know how it works. It's not what the Creative Commons license allows you to do. There was originally, let's do it. This is not the first time a user has wanted to remove either a sizeable or let's say important section of the wicking. And if they were still a user, if they weren't banned, which they were eventually, we'll talk about that in the drama later, but they ended up eventually banned, not just revoked, both accounts. She ended up banned both accounts. I'm probably gonna leave those on just, anyway, just to show that I'm not very good at this. Names, oh man, I'm so bad with names. Okay, so the user asked for their stuff to be deleted. The site originally was gonna have them deleted and then they found themselves a loophole to avoid having to do to, I should say, avoid having to make the difficult decision because they actually created as much work for themselves by avoiding the difficult decision as they would have had to do had they had to delete everything. So they've avoided no work. In fact, they probably have created far more work for themselves. First thing they did was held a town hall meeting and gone, you know, our policy for the longest time has been author autonomy. Authors can remove anything they'd like to from the wiki, but this is inconvenient for us right now because it represents 2% of the wiki's content. And honestly, it's a lot of work and we don't wanna do it. So what does the community think? We'll leave it up to you. And the justification for this, by the way, is in Harmony's send-off post, they left their works to the community. Delete all of my works, but the content of those works, I leave to the community to do with as they wish. And the SAP wiki's staff probably at some point, one of them had this like light bulb go off at the top of their head and they're like, we can get around this problem. They left their work, she left our works to the community. We'll just give them to the community to decide. Ha ha. And so they held their town hall. There was a long, you know, whatever, I'm not gonna read through the whole thing. And eventually they ended up with three proposals. Proposal one, status quo. That's it. They don't do anything, essentially. They refuse to remove the works. They refuse to do anything about the works. Maybe they'll figure out a way to remove attribution as necessary, but I'm not entirely sure that it's legally possible. Two, the remove all works. Individual community members can make copies of them offsite as necessary and so on and so forth. Also the SAP wiki realizes that, because this person, Harmony has been around since the beginning almost. So they own not just series one article slots, which are highly valued, but sub 100 series one slots, which are probably the most valued of all SAP slots on the wiki. So they're like, we're gonna hold off on those. There's not a rush of bad articles to be put in there. Which I don't understand the point of that because it's like, I think two or three of those are like in the 40s. So they're not even very, I mean, they're incredibly well read and they're still very poorly rated. Probably a reason for that. So like, what are you worried about other crappy articles going in there? Anyway. Or proposal three. And I like the idea that they have, I mean, they have ranked choice voting here so that it's sort of alleviated a little bit. But the idea that there's one is do nothing and then two different options to split attention and support for doing what the author has asked. So one is delete everything and do nothing afterwards. And the other one is delete everything and then allow staff to repost certain articles as necessary to support other works on the wiki. This is not the first time though that this has happened. Fishmonger is an old user who did something similar to what a pixelated harmony here has done, got banned and then asked for their works to be deleted. Technically, it wasn't in that order this time. So it was a little bit less of the maliciousness. So there was a little bit, it's complicated. The important part is that they were banned and we're not gonna go then. They were banned and they asked for their works to be deleted. But when Fishmonger asked, they just got rid of them. They said, sure, there was a little bit of hand wringing, a little bit of problems, but eventually they did it because the SCP wiki is an author's site. I mean, it's run by authors mostly, almost invariably everyone who's in staff has written something for the wiki. And so they whole, and this is the same reason like, I've talked about this as a problem before, because for example, they don't consider image plagiarism to be plagiarism, but they do consider textual plagiarism to be plagiarism. They draw a distinction because they are authors and not artists generally. There's some artists in there too, but in a general sense, most people who are authors on the wiki don't consider image plagiarism to be plagiarism or if they do, they might be like, yeah, it's plagiarism, but it's not as serious, right? That's how authors tend to think, not all authors, but that is how authors, especially younger authors who aren't involved in intellectual property on a long-term basis tend to view things. The stuff I create needs to be protected, the stuff other people create. So I mean, I could just use that, right? Anyway, but because we're dealing with a bunch of authors, the policy has always been that you have control over the works you've created on the wiki, period. Almost, and it's almost sacrosanct. It's almost considered sacrosanct to the point, or has been, I should say, to the point where like, they will bend over backwards to obey authorial requests with regards to content. And when Fishmonger, who at the time had only written like 30 articles for the website, that as far as I am to understand, weren't particularly good. And I mean, there was a lot of content. It was a single series that had a lot of branches from other people's works. And that was the important part. When you pull the rug out from underneath other people, you are affecting other people. But it was his works. They were a little foggy on the legality of it. They're probably a little bit more certain now than they were at the time. And they're just like, let's just get rid of them, save ourselves the trouble, save the problem. The SCP wiki is not doing that this time. And I think part of it is they're just angry. But also, as I said, she left her works to the community. So that's the problem, right? And you might be like, well, I should say you might be. I was like, I asked a staff member this point blank. We're gonna go ahead and grab. I'm not gonna put it up on the screen because this was a private conversation. I'm not gonna out the particular staff member I was talking to, but I talked to multiple staff members. She did give her articles to the community. So I don't see how she didn't bring this upon herself. And I said very clearly, couldn't she just retract her grant to the community? And arguably, hasn't she already, if she's arguing against them deciding, and we'll talk about that again in the thing later, but she's sent a large number of personal messages directly to people voting to keep her works on the wiki saying, please change your vote. Maybe that's a mischaracterization. Those PMs and DMs were a lot more hostile than that. But that was the gist of it, right? So arguably, she has changed her mind and community has, but she can't edit her posts because she's banned from the wiki. And it was like, I said, I know the post can't be edited, but staff is aware of her intentions and desires here and are deliberately ignoring them. And this staff member said very clearly, yes, they are very angry with her. And I was like, that's not a good way to make policy. And it's not a very good way to make policy. I wanna be clear here. I understand where both sides are coming from to an extent, but the SAP wiki is a community and you didn't, most people will be like, you volunteered, therefore I should give you a certain amount of leeway. But I'm thinking more along the lines of you volunteered, so you don't really get to complain that there's too much work in front of you. Either do it or stop being that staff member. And of course, people are angry. Everyone's angry in this. I should say not everyone, because I'm not angry. I'm a little bit disappointed in everybody, but I'm not angry. But that's the important thing of what's going on right now. The vote has three more days to complete. It looks very, very strongly like the solution is gonna be leave the articles up. Because of course it is. If you asked 20 authors, I bet it would be closer, but they open it up to the whole community. And this is just people who relate. Yeah, of course, it's like going up to people like, there's $20, everyone's getting $20 for just every day for free. Would you like to keep getting $20 or not keep getting $20? It's not quite the same thing, but it's close to it. What do you think people are gonna choose who have no vested interests in the rights or of the people who are losing $20 every day? Of course they're gonna say keep it. Why wouldn't they say keep it? Of course if you put this question to the community, the vast majority of people are gonna go, yeah, I'd like to keep access to these articles because it affects me negatively if you take them away. That is not enough in and of itself to justify keeping something on the wiki. Sometimes the right thing to do, the doing the right thing is hard, period. Anyway, we had 30 minutes, Jesus. That's probably gonna be only cut down able to maybe 30, 25, didn't do very many retakes. Anyway, that's part one. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, please hit the subscribe button and hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos. And then head on over to patreon.com forward slash de-samaritan and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has. Including Dr. J. Redacted and Sinjeriki who have both pledged at $100 and Morgan who has pledged at $40. I'm probably gonna use this twice because I am gonna have to split this video in half. So this will be from the first part and for the second part. Thanks for letting me know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on whatever day it is because this is a multiple thing, I hate my life so much.