 Long time sight members have probably heard the phrase, there is no canon about a thousand times at this point. It's possible that even casual SCP fans and readers have heard the same thing, but again and again, even after I created a whole video on the topic, in comments for future videos and comments on articles that I've written on the wiki, I see people missing the point of that phrase. So today we're going to talk about why you're wrong about how the SCP wiki works. Normally when people interact with fiction, they often internalize and build their own ideas of what things are, and that's kind of a canon. Many fictional works have an in canon and out of canon set of works attached to them. For example, there are hundreds of Star Trek novels that are non-canon, but anything they show on screen is considered to be canon, well except for one episode of Voyager, but I digress. As Star Wars took a completely different path for years and made almost all of the books and games and pretty much everything else made around the film content canon to the films as well, that didn't last once Disney took over. When most people read a book series or watch a television show, the idea of what's actually happening on the screen or in the pages being non-canon is completely alien. If Disney said tomorrow that a new hope was non-canon, people would be pretty flummoxed, and if George R.R. Martin said that a storm of swords was non-canon to Game of Thrones, then people would be rightfully confused. Which is probably why it's hard to approach the concept of there is no canon on the SCP Wiki, but what does it really mean? Well, first of all, that phrase is itself kind of misleading, which may be why people have difficulty understanding it. There is a baseline canon of swords, it's just very, very basic. There is an organization called the SCP Foundation, and it keeps anomalies in containment and out of view of the rest of the world, but that's about it. Beyond that, there's very little that's true for all works, and then I wasn't always true, which is also contributing, I think, to people not understanding it. The site up until mid-2010 was really very much an interconnected large canon. You can see it very clearly in the earliest of SCP works, and again, I think that may be why new readers have trouble understanding it, since those early works are what they've mostly read the most of. Major SCPs show up in testing logs for other SCPs, tales where multiple SCPs are featured players, or prevalent, and the doctors obviously work together quite often. But then something changed. In June of 2010, one of the site's biggest earliest contributors kind of had a hissy fit about getting banned, and they demanded that all of their works be taken down. The Wiki complied, but this also meant that suddenly there was a huge hole in the site's strongly connected canon. And from then on, fiction on the site became more and more disconnected until about the time Series 3 came around in 2014, where the idea of cross leaking was kind of taboo. And since then, we've slowly walked back from that, and the idea of more interconnected stories has sort of become the norm all over again. But it should be noted that there are cannons on the Wiki as well, and these are explicitly interconnected stories, usually with a basic premise that changes something about the baseline canon. Broken Masquerade has an SCP foundation that no longer keeps things secret from the public. And Founded features a universe where the foundation never existed. And there are many, many, many more canons, so outside of those, it's probably more accurate to say that there are infinite canons, rather than there is no canon. And there's a good reason for saying it that way, because each individual article or tale takes place in its own universe. And that goes for all five or six thousand articles on the Wiki. You can choose when writing to connect it to something else, but that doesn't change the thing you're connecting to. The best example of this from my own works was a collaboration I did with SCP Illustrated about the termination of SCP-096, and people on that video and on the article, because I posted it on the Wiki, called it Fan Fiction and Non-Canon, which betrays a basic misunderstanding of how the site works. There are plenty of people who could be writing stories in SCPs and GOI documents in a world where SCP-096 doesn't exist at all, much less gets killed that way. Each story is its own island. Which is also why when people ask me, can I use Samaritan in a story where he does X? I always just say, don't bother asking me that. You can use him in anything. If I don't like it, it's just an alternate universe. And if you're new to the Wiki, this is among the very first lessons you need to learn, because it's not a limiting thing. It's very, very freeing. You can always write an interconnected story if you want, but it's not the default setting for SCP writing. I'd like to give a special shout out to my Patreons for this month. If you'd like to join these fine folk, head on over to patreon.com. Link will be in the description below. And finally, special thanks to The Vulgan for making this sweet, sweet outro and the little intro you saw earlier. And for you, thanks for watching.