 So one of the very first you're wrong about videos I ever did was you're wrong about the SCP Wiki in which I explained how there is no canon on the wiki and in that video I do briefly mention that there are set canons but I don't really talk about them too much. Today we're going to talk about those canons and how you can write for them and what they really mean. So there are at least 32 canons on the wiki as of this video's recording. Out of those I have looking at the list anyway about eight of these canons I've written in and about four I think I've actually started myself. So that's actually a pretty good percentage of the total. Now to be fair none of the canons I started were started alone. It's always good to have other people to help you out with the beginning mainly because in order to create a canon you have to have at least three authors anyway so it's nice to work together with other people that's sort of the whole point of it. Which dovetails nicely into the basics of what is a canon on the SCP wiki and I can read from the canon page right now to explain what I say series of articles needs to have in order to qualify as a canon. The instructions are very simple if you're wanting to build a canon and have it added to the page the important thing to remember is that it must be a shared project to qualify for inclusion your canon must meet the following requirements one a minimum of five articles written two a minimum of three authors writing those articles three your canon cannot be closed to other new contributors and four your canon can never be finished and remember collaboration and innovation is the point of this that is the purpose of creating a canon. Now there are writers on the SCP wiki who some of these comments either went over their head or maybe they were written specifically to call them out in a little way. I'm not going to name who those people are but I think a lot of the people listening who do know will know exactly who I'm talking about. The thing is creating a canon essentially takes control of your created world out of your hands because you're basically saying that it's now a collaborative project that anyone is invited to participate in and anything you do or anything anyone else does can be valid in your world as long as it doesn't directly contradict something that's already been written. Now there are authors who disagree with that perspective but when I was creating the aces and eights canon which is I think the most recent one I've created I was looking at it and this is the one I probably had the I'd say the strongest editorial hand in which is ironic because I was trying to create it as as free and open of a canon as possible it's an old west canon where essentially the SCP foundation was never formed but a lot of the modern elements of the SCP foundation exist in the old west but in a different form so it's essentially just take the modern foundation and set it in the old west what does SCP 682 look like in that world and in mine it's like unstoppable confederate calvary brigade called the 682nd uh that that during the night will go out and just destroy towns or dr. kondraki is actually conrad drake sheriff riddle but then actually uh sort of belies the point of creating a canon what you're doing is you're creating a shared world that other people can participate in but there usually needs to be some sort of let's say event or some sort of premise that differentiates it from the baseline canon so like I said an aces and eights it's set in the old west that's literally the only real difference but in straight on till morning there's an elaborate backstory where the earth has been switched with another planet and the scp foundation forces in space in 1973 are unable to figure out how to get back home so they create a fleet and they a la battle star galactica try to find earth so in those two different canons one set in a old west uh style and one is set in a science fiction style you can actually see the two different the basically the two different kinds of cannons there can be one is setting old west and one is an event that happens that affects all future stories and you can see this in other scp canons as well like unfounded is literally just the scp foundation was never founded and everything else is exactly the same what does the world look like that makes unfounded kind of a mixture of setting and event but in this particularly is this more of a negative space thing since it's about something that didn't happen but which is taken for granted in the modern scp wiki ultimately though how these canons come to form very much differs from person to person or canon to canon and even as someone who has created four and had i've had a hand in the creation of a couple others but like i wouldn't necessarily consider myself one of the founders of those cannon or even like a primary contributor i just was there at the beginning for some of them and some canons are giant like the resurrection has probably a dozen authors maybe maybe more i'm honestly i don't i i would it would be difficult to keep count and a lot of them are the old school authors that you know like dr clef or dr brider the deadly moose or just people who were writing for the scp wiki a long time ago and are well known for being high quality writers but i'm going to talk a little bit about how a variety of the ones i've helped to found were created to give you an idea of how you might want to go about creating your own cannon so first we're going to talk a little bit about aces and aids it's the last cannon i've worked on so far and it's the one i had the most probably creative control over it's about 15 articles in it so far and what happened with it is i wrote a tale called now hollow fires burn out to black and lights are guttering low which was sort of supposed to be an introduction to the cannon but it didn't really catch on i wrote it for a contest back in 2017 for the history contest which i believe it won in the tail category and for the longest time it was rated i don't know plus 70 plus 80 something along those lines it got most of its votes during the contest and didn't really start to accumulate anymore and then late last year some people were talking i think it was in discord about how man they really wish they could write the scp stuff in the old west and it led to some conversations where i pointed out i'd actually written a tale said it that way and i had created a setting where essentially what was i believe scp 682 kondraki the old man and a couple of other scp's oh canon able as well were involved in the story but in versions that were set for the wild west and a bunch of people got together and started really wanting to work on this as a concept and independently came up with their own tales and a lot of times people will come to me because some cannons are run with a bit more of a heavy hand by the person who's creating them and be like can i do this and my answer is always yes absolutely you don't even need to ask me just write it and write something you enjoy set in the setting you know if and as long as it doesn't contradict what's already been written i don't care and so far it's worked out pretty well i mean a 15 tail cannon is actually pretty good and as i said each of these stories generally stands on its own anyway so it's not like it's a continuing story that hasn't been finished it's just going to keep going forever and that is in opposition to the very first canon i helped found which has a completely different genesis the first one i helped found was the gulf and i co-founded it with myself and kate mcteris uh and uh in sepid paroxysm i believe another author who isn't really on the site anymore neither is kate but kate mcteris and in sepid uh both contributed but kate was really the driving creative force behind it and i was like kind of a secondary guy who bounced ideas off of came up you know whatever i wasn't the primary contributor in the creation of it but i was enough of a secondary to consider myself a co-creator and what essentially had happened with the gulf anyway is that myself in sepid paroxysm and kate mcteris were all writing in the same setting and what had happened was kate had been on the site already and she was writing uh some really great works uh with its own kind of twist on it uh and myself and in sepid were fans of that particular setting and it was also set in the southeast of the us where i live and i believe in sepid also lived and so we basically just picked out places where we were and decided that those areas were what we would focus on and a lot of authors do this you'll see a lot of uh dj cactuses stuff is set in indiana so you learn you know you write from where you're from and the gulf is that for me see that's why site 88 is set up in alabama it's much further south than where i live but it is set in my state because i wanted to set something in like the area i live that i had a better connection to but yeah what happened was all three of us were writing in this shared setting without realizing what the requirements for a canon even were and we all had completely different reasons for doing it in completely different stories but the same basic setting which would use kate's world as a backdrop and then one day i was looking at the canon page and saw that we had already met the requirements for building a canon we just needed to name it and create a hub which is what happened kate being the fantastic writer that she is had an idea for like a shared story that we're all going to work on and it was really very structured and it is probably what killed the canon before it even started see she posted the hub we started getting working on it and it just died and the only author who stuck around and what happens is that authors don't stick around on the scp wiki so if you have somebody else you're working with and it's like important that that they actually stick around and work with you on the thing it doesn't work when they leave and people will leave like i've been around for about five years now writing i've been around i've been on the wiki since 2012 i started writing in 2014 and while i'll probably never go anywhere i have to expect that most of the people i work with will eventually move on or do something else so creating a canon with someone else can be very difficult if you rely on that person to be the primary driving force and that's what kate was so when she left the canon even though i still write tales based in it kind of died the gulf is a particularly influential canon and it really heavily had an influence on resurrection now resurrection exists without the gulf but a lot of what happened in the gulf is canon to resurrection and that's another thing about scp articles or tales they can be canon to more than one canon as long as what's in them doesn't directly contradict to a particular canon's premise or setting an article can exist in multiple canons and one of those that i'd like to point out is scp 2987 which i believe exists in at least three if not four canons it exists in a iad it shows up in at least one of those stories it shows up in resurrection it shows up in the gulf obviously and the thing about the gulf in resurrection is that anything that could be in the gulf could be in resurrection because they're so interconnected but the resurrection canon is much bigger and actually you know really establishes its world and also it's part of those twisted pines which i actually didn't know originally i learned somewhat after the fact that scp 2987 kind of had an influence on the creation of those twisted pines not a huge like not an outsized influence but it had a strong influence on its early creation because it was about you know anderson robotics and working with margell carter and dark and what that would look like my absolute favorite founding of an scp wiki canon though has got to be the ship and a bottle uh canon which is just it's the it's the funniest thing i've ever seen so the friendly vandal wrote a tale called second date and in it cleven kondraki have a relationship and it's implied to be a romantic relationship and also there is an event that goes on in the past of the story where uh dr kondraki accidentally gets his we'll say private parts so that youtube doesn't demonetize my video stuck in a aquafina water bottle specifically an aquafina brand water bottle and what happened was um some homophobic people didn't like the idea of putting clef and kondraki together on the website so they complained a lot and loudly and one of them actually contacted dr clef and as i mentioned dr clef and dr kondraki were the ones that were involved in the romantic relationship one of them contacted the writer dr clef and complained at them about what was going on in the article and dr clef's response was my favorite response ever he wrote a sequel independently of the friendly vandal and then things went uphill from there because there are now a total of 10 articles in that canon in fact i'm the one that wrote the sixth one i wish i could have been in the first five that would have been great but as soon as i read it i was like oh no i have to do this and i will mention some of these tales are very not safe for work so you know keep that in mind if you go to look this up but it just goes to show that the creation of a canon can come in many different forms some of them are planned and some of them are very unplanned i think the most important thing to keep in mind if you're planning on founding a canon on the adc wiki is that you are giving up complete control over the canon when you create it as long as you're creating a tale series you don't ever have to say that it exists in the same canon as somebody else's story because there is no canon but the minute you decide to try and get the extra promotion and recognition and prestige of having a canon on the scp wiki you are giving up control in order to get those things and there are authors i mentioned at the very beginning who don't like that idea they feel like they should be able to get all the benefits without giving anything away but that's the trade off you gotta make and if you can't accept that you need to not make it a canon anyway that's it and now i'd like to give special thanks to my patrons i have three new patrons to list off today we have jaylin tucnees we have michelage zarziki and rail brawn rail brawn pledged at five dollars and and michelage and jaylin pledged at twenty dollars each thank you very much i genuinely appreciate this is the kind of thing that means i can continue to make this content for my uh subscribers and uh you know everyone who wants to learn more about the scp wiki or even just even if they don't want to learn how to write for it maybe they just enjoy this content it's nice that i can continue to create it for them if you like this content you can pledge on patreon yourself at patreon.com forward slash d samarian and get your name into a video as well if that's not for you scroll down just a little bit and hit the subscribe button then hit the notification bell next to that it's how i know i'm not alone out here and i'll see you again on thursday