 Oftentimes both on and off the wiki you will hear people either complain about or talk about how good it is that the scp wiki's content has sort of drifted in both type and quality over the years and a lot of the time you're going to hear things like series one was better or series one was worse but regardless of which of those camps you fall into i'm here to tell you about how you're probably wrong about series one now it can certainly be said that series one has a particular feel to it and that the majority of its articles tend to fall into the same ish category the idea of an object that does a thing when we talk about scp 173 it's just a statue that goes around breaking people's necks if they blink near it or in a room with it i should say and if we talk about something like scp 106 it's just a old man covered in black tar who has a pocket dimension who maybe likes to eat people sort of unsure the fact is a lot of series one articles don't really have any sort of narrative attached to them i should say no complex narrative attached to them all articles on the scp wiki and pretty much any writing whatsoever has a narrative of some kind it just might not be a very good narrative or it might not be a very in-depth narrative and that's okay there's plenty of value to be had in reading say a magic item catalog out of dnd that could be that could be fun for people especially when i was younger i could imagine i see myself reading that kind of stuff and thinking about the kind of stories i could tell with it but that doesn't mean that the piece itself has inherent value as a narrative now the biggest problem with treating series one as that kind of article is that series one isn't a monolith there's a variety of types of articles in series one you've got scp 173 type articles but you've also got scp 093 which is the red sea object and the red sea object has an incredibly in-depth narrative in fact it's one of the few uh series one articles that actually got me interested in reading more of the site and the other half of that is that not every series one article is like 10 or 11 years old for example i wrote scp 245 when a article that was in that slot actually got deleted for quality issues it dropped down to negative 10 it was gone and i put an article in there and it's a video game that you play and that delivers its narrative that way but that's a series one article so when people talk about series one what they usually mean is the kind of article i either like or dislike depending on who they are and there's an elitism on both sides of that coin although it can be harder to see the elitism of the series one fans because a lot of not all of them but a lot of them uh what's the word so i'm looking for they espouse their views in a unrefined way i got plenty of comments in videos i've done in the past that full of grammatical errors where people were talking about how great series one was and that the scp wiki needs to get back to it there's a lot lot less of people who think the series one was bad who also similarly talk that way but that doesn't mean that either side is inherently correct or incorrect it just means that there's different kinds of people i think that series one fans tend to skew younger and the series one haters for lack of a better term tend to skew older but there's definitely crossover on both sides of that coin and the truth of the matter is is that the elitism of both sides is kind of dumb and this kind of thing is definitely not restricted to just scp articles i mean think about the latest michael bay movie it does great financially and people look at that as a i literally saw someone say that transformers revenge of the falling was a sign of the fall of western civilization which is problematic for a number of reasons but primarily it's just stupid the thing is the scp wiki has enough room for both kinds of people and both kinds of articles i've written both magic objects and monster manual entries i've written long in-depth narrative scps and the truth of the matter is is that there's fans for both kinds and you as an author if you're planning on writing for the wiki should remember that the fans are the people who you are actually writing your articles for now in the end you want to make sure you're writing for yourself as well so you got to write what you like but if you want to see upvotes on your article you also have to consider what other people like and the idea of treating series one as something to be avoided is problematic for a variety of additional reasons this is going to be an unpopular opinion but i'm going to give this as an example i have read a little bit of harry potter i watched one movie i don't really enjoy it now i personally enjoy science fiction as a genre and there's a lot of bad science fiction out there that i'll read and or watch just because i enjoyed the genre more i can see that harry potter is probably high quality writing but to me it doesn't work does that mean because i don't like it i should say stuff like jk rolling should write more science fiction novels and not write any more harry potter because that's dumb what she wrote was successful she should continue to do what successful especially she enjoys writing it but the primary problem is is that creators are always going to be beholden to their fans and fans make or break a work and we can bemoan things like michael bay movies all day but as long as people go to see them they have a value and frankly he should continue to create more until they stop making money the issue i think is definitely elitism on both sides or even just a matter of gatekeeping the idea that oh you wrote an article that's just a magic item so you don't really belong here or you wrote an article that's not horror and has a narrative thrown on top of it it's a love story scp that's not what the scp foundation is supposed to be about anytime you hear someone say that's not what the scp foundation is supposed to be about they're being a fucking idiot and i've never fully understood why it is so difficult for people to understand that things they don't like might be good and things they don't like might be worthy of being emulated i do more understand when someone ties up part of their self-worth in the things they like that harry potter i'll go back to that as an example if you insulted harry potter to somebody there's a lot of people especially who people who grew up reading it and it's an integral part of their lives would legitimately feel personally attacked if you say it's bad right but that's not a personal attack on you and that extends to people who might even just say as i have it's not for me what do you mean it's not for you it's the perfect work it's amazing how can you not like the things that i like and that is probably getting a little bit into a area of philosophy here because it's because people think of everything as being objectively true like if something is good and i like it then everyone must like it and if they say they don't like it they're either deliberately lying to me or they just have really bad taste like there's something wrong with them if they don't like it because there's definitely nothing wrong with me when no one was saying there was anything wrong with you in the first place i'm gonna note again here because this is very important to understand there's a lot of people listening to this and thinking of the other side there's people who are fans of series one thinking about the people who write long narrative articles and they're thinking ah this is directed at those people and there's people who write the long narrative articles who look at the people who are just fans of like 10 series one articles on the they're saying this is about those people let me tell you something it's about both of you people we have to stop narrowing our avenues and we have to start expanding our avenues of creative freedom and the scp wiki has done an amazing job of that by the way like outside of what is truly a minority of people there it's a large and vocal minority but it's still a minority of people outside of that minority i think that the wiki has done an amazingly good job of allowing all kinds of articles of course there's always going to be assholes that you have to watch out for and unfortunately the scp wiki i feel has a higher than normal asshole to non-asshole ratio but don't feel guilty about liking what you like don't feel guilty about writing what you like if it's any good it will survive on the wiki and in general will be accepted in society as a good work but at the same time don't get that smug sense of superiority about how what you like is better than what everybody else likes and if anyone else has different tastes then they're just bad people or they just don't know how to create good work smug superiority is my department not yours anyway that's this episode if you like the video scroll 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