 Ahoy, and welcome to the channel. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about why articles on the SCP wiki have been trending towards shorter lately. Now this isn't an absolute trend. There are certainly articles on the wiki that are mid-sized longer, but if you were following new articles on the SCP wiki you may have noticed an influx of 500 to a thousand, or even lower than that, 200 to a thousand word articles. And the real question now becomes what happened. There was a trend for a while, actually just a straight up, the way the wiki had become, was that longer was better, generally. I think it was because most of the authors were taking themselves very seriously, and I don't mean this in a bad way, but taking themselves very seriously and creating what they would hope to be great works of art, and in order to do that you need a lot of word space to do it. And so there was a bit of a problem, I should say, and it was a problem, where there were just there were just too many words going up on the wiki to read reliably for a couple of years almost, and there still are, by the way, I should say that, but at the same time you could read a chunk of the SCP wiki and actually complete more than, you know, two or three articles in a week, regardless of how much free time you have. But about two months ago, the SCP wiki put up a shortest new pages section in the left-hand toolbar, and from that moment on people were chasing the bottom for word count, not with quality again. This isn't an insult, I just mean chasing the bottom on word count, trying to get as few words on the page as possible, and a couple of people have done some cheating, for lack of a better way to put it, to try and get themselves at the top of the list. Essentially the shortest word count page just lists articles by characters, total number of characters on the page, so a page with, you know, two, page with just a list pages module that references to another page technically counts as less than a page that has, you know, an actual article in it, even if that actual article is technically shorter. People were doing that, in fact the entirety of, Sony posted up the entirety of the Great Gatsby, but they did it with a list pages module, so it was listed as the shortest page on the SCP wiki, despite it being a, was that a 40,000 50,000 word novel, and it's also in the public domain now, so they could post it. And this is interesting, it's an interesting trend actually to watch happen, especially considering how long, like the trend was for the 6k articles, like one of them was essentially novel length, I think probably maybe more than one of them was a novel length, but one of them was definitively a novel length article, and that's just, I've said it before and I'll say it again, and I don't want anyone to take this like too roughly, but the average quality of works on the SCP wiki are not so high that I'm willing to commit a novel's worth of attention to your articles, like your article might be good enough and it might, but I'm not, I'm not, I'm just not, and not only beyond that, but when people post, you know, when people have a 50,000 word draft, they also have to get feedback on it, you know, I'm sorry, you know people get paid to do actual novel editing, right, that's all I want to say, I used to it actually, speaking, I'm used to actually get some money for doing critique, I might actually want to go back to do it that one day, but you know, people get paid to do that kind of editing, and for the idea, and generally on the idea that you know your end result work is actually going to be publishable, but in this particular case you're literally giving it away for free, so you're asking people to commit a lot of time and effort, not just just for reading it and then trying to give you feedback, like really good detailed feedback, structurally or even line editing that some people are generally are best at, it's just, you can't, you just can't, but if you give me a two to 200 to a thousand word article and I can do that all day, absolutely, no problem, in fact I used to have a, I think it was a 5,000 word limit on my Patreon back when I offered critique for it, but in the end, like the SCP wiki needs to understand this, this is how you incentivize people to do a particular thing, give them more upvotes for it, or more accurately, give them more attention for it, because if the more attention you can put on a particular type of content, the more people will do that type of content, period, you want to see more of shorter works on the wiki, create a thing on the left hand side where people can look at the pages by link, then they will do that and that's what will happen, but yeah, it's an interesting new trend and actually is the reason why I have felt comfortable going back and writing something for the wiki, because the trend had always been longer, longer, longer and some of the shorter stuff I was doing just didn't fit what the wiki was looking for anymore, and so the wiki has somehow come back around to my style of writing, so I'm kind of happy with that and I've written longer stuff, not only have I written longer stuff, but I've written longer SCPs, longer tales, definitely short story link stuff, but I've never written novel link stuff for the SCP wiki, I can't imagine committing that much time and effort into an article or into a tale for the SCP wiki, but that doesn't mean that other people shouldn't, it just means that if everyone does it, everything falls apart, I'm so much happier with this like mixture, because there are still longer articles going on, anyway, thought I'd go into a little bit of discussion as to what was going on and why and just kind of talk about my preferences for length, and again I said this before, and my preference for length is somewhere between I'd say anywhere above 500, I think anything lower than 500, you're starting to get a little rough, writing short articles is not easy, it's easier than long articles, but long articles are hard, and short articles are both hard, it's just slightly easier to do it in a short form, and people have made many, many mistakes with their short form articles that are masked by, you know, they're a little funny or they're just short enough to get an idea across and people are like, yeah, all right, I don't want to downvote it, but like writing a short article is only marginally easier than writing a long article, getting a good, I should say, writing a good short article is only marginally easier than writing a good long article, because there's, and there are others, it's a different skill set, honestly got it, it's a different skill set, your pacing is different, your methodology of storytelling is different, how many characters you can use is honestly different, in a short story length piece, you can have two or three characters with actual story focus, but in a piece that's, say, 500 words, you can have one character at most, and you're not going to be able to build a very strong emotional connection between the audience and that character, it's just not going to happen, and at 200 words, like I don't even know that you can build a connection to one character with 200 words, I've seen people try it and fail, I've not yet, I don't know that, I'm going to say that I know it's possible, it's absolutely possible, the old Hemingway short story, or not short story, flash fiction of baby shoes for sale, never worn, does build a bit of an, just a skosh of an emotional connection to the underlying story, there, you know, people can critique that story as if it's useful or good or whatever, but it's a good example of what I'm talking about, but yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's possible, I don't, and again, no one should take this too strongly, but the average writer on the SCP Wiki is just not good enough to pull that off, the average writer, a few of them are really good at it, I think, I don't even think that I'm necessarily good enough to make, I think quite highly of myself, but I don't think I'm good enough to create a good strong connection between character and reader in under 200 words, it's possible, it's just not likely, and so that leaves you with basic object SCPs or funny SCPs, again, a good joke doesn't need, jokes are all about compression, I'd like to say, the more you can minimize the setup to the punch line, because the punch line is just one line, it's a punch line, the more you can minimize that setup, the funnier it's going to be, honestly, and even a main list article that's funny works for this way, anyway, that's it, thank you very much for watching, if you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button, and then hit the notification bell next to that, so you're notified when I upload new videos, and leave a comment, more engagement is good, I'm not joking, hit the like button, leave a comment, and if you're not subscribed, subscribe already, this is very important for the health of the channel, if you want to see me keep doing videos like this, which I've seen people say, they want me to talk more about writing on the SCP wiki, and then no one watches these videos, so I don't know what to tell you, so if you do watch it and you want to see more, engage with the video and YouTube will recommend it to more people, and more people will watch it, or don't, and okay, see you later, I'll do more on 173 or whatever, I will do the content that the audience wants to see, that I also enjoyed, but that the audience wants to see, and then that's just how it's going to be, but yeah, hit the, do all the engagement thingies, 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 mc cashmill and synderiki, mc cashmill is pledged at $50, and synderiki is pledged at $100, it's nice to know that I'm not alone out here, and I will see you all again on Thursday.