 What if I told you that writing for the SCP Wiki is actually pretty easy even if you're not an established author? Let's talk about how you're wrong about the SCP Wiki's quality standards. So interestingly, one of the Patreon rewards that I offer is a co-author at the $20 tier, and in it I specifically tell prospective authors that I will ensure that they get an article up on the Wiki regardless of what their ideas or drafts or whatever are. And you might ask how is it possible for me to be so sure that I can get something to stick on the Wiki, and the truth of the matter is that that's not a very difficult bar to clear. Now this is a common misconception not just among new authors, but among some established authors as well. I know a fair number of people, some of them are friends of mine, who tie up a bit of their self-worth into being able to write for the SCP Wiki, and heck even I'm guilty of it from time to time. I'm certainly willing to exploit other people's opinions of the quality of the SCP Wiki for my own benefit, I mean, otherwise why would I have a channel whose secondary purpose is to teach people how to write for the SCP Wiki? The truth of the matter is that easy doesn't mean necessarily that it's going to be simple. It's a bit of a complicated process, and there are certain things that you can do that pretty much screw you up along the way. But frankly, if you have a fun idea, passable writing skills, and you don't screw it up too badly on say clinical tone or the way you've got it formatted, you can pretty much get anything to stay on the SCP Wiki. But if that's the case, why is it so difficult for new authors to understand how to get things to stick? Well, I think beyond the misconception that the quality standards are high, and a lot of times people will actually look at that as a discouragement from continuing, I think maybe there's just a misunderstanding of how the SCP Wiki operates. There are some very basic things that you have to do, and yes, if you screw those up, you can't get something to stick on the Wiki. But just because you read one thing that was really good, doesn't mean that the entire Wiki is good. So a lot of established authors will look at series one stuff and say, well, that's garbage. We've gotten so much better over time. And while they are strictly speaking correct, the current average article quality is higher than it was 10 years ago, as it must be considering how things and standards evolved. Ultimately, that doesn't mean that the standards of the SCP Wiki are, say, to the level of professional writing. And that's the real examination here. There are plenty of people who write for the Wiki and are perfectly happy with the idea that they are essentially amateurs, and that they're just writing for fun. And this is just a bit of a hobby for them. But there are also, and I know it's because I talked to and try to help a lot of new authors, people who are trying to use the SCP Wiki as maybe a stepping stone to learn how to write better so that they can become successful professional writers. And I'm not saying that the SCP Wiki can't lead to that, although I will tell you right now, I have not yet ever met anyone who started on the SCP Wiki and became a successful mainstream writer. And I'm sure if we had someone like that, we would probably know about it. But even some of the paragons of quality, quote unquote, aren't always good. I mean, I don't think I necessarily fall into that category. I have a lot of stuff that I put up just because I think it's good enough. I'd say out of the 100 or so articles I have, maybe half of them are below average quality with regards to, say, normal writing standards. And of the other half that are above average, probably only 10 of them are ones I would consider myself to be very proud of. And out of those, maybe two or three that I think a professional writer would look at and say these are very good. And out of those two or three, probably none of them a professional writer would actually look at and think we're good. I mean, I'm constantly trying to improve. And that's the important part about the SCP Wiki. It's not that the quality standards are necessarily very high to begin with, it's just that you need to be able to start from a low point to get to a high point. One particular author's works, who I kind of think of when I think of the capacity for a good author to maybe not produce something that is stellar in quality, is Collinen. Collinen is considered to be a particular, well, I don't know if he's really on the wiki anymore, but he's considered to be a particularly harsh critic. In fact, it's become a bit of a meme and to the point where I think it's a bit unfair to the author himself to be treated as though his upvotes or downvotes are the major break of somebody's career, which I've met people and talked to people in private chats before who either deleted or thought about deleting, and this multiple people, by the way, because of his reputation. You may not know who that is, but on the wiki has a bit of a reputation. But because his reputation was so good, he downloaded their works and they thought, ah, my stuff sucks. Now the problem with that is, of course, that all our stuff pretty much sucks. It's like maybe 1% of it is of high enough quality to be something you should be proud of. Of course, you're going to be proud of more than that because you're comparing it to other stuff that's not great. All of us writers strive for that type of top tier content. But like Collinen is the example I use because I've read his 01 and frankly, I'm unimpressed. As a writer, I've usually come to expect great things from him because he is a great writer. I read his 01 and I mean, it's not bad, but it's not good. It's just kind of in the middle. This isn't just true of the wiki, by the way, that's true of writing in general. The best of writers will have duds constantly. The trick is, you know, picking yourself up off the ground and then writing again. But something that people miss is probably because, you know, they're used to writing on, say, a forum somewhere, some rp forum, or they're used to writing on fanfiction.net or any number of other collaborative fiction sites that have zero standards that you can write anything and it's not going to go away. Yes, people may comment or be able to comment and say, this is bad, this is good or whatever. But ultimately, there's no quality control at all for those sites. Whereas on the scp wiki, there is some form of quality control in the up or down vote system. Not that up or down votes are necessarily an indicator of quality, they're simply an indicator of success. And I should note that the reason for this video is that a few weeks back I was talking to someone who's writing for another wiki, which I'll remain unnamed, because he doesn't believe that his writing is good enough for the main wiki. And that kind of reaction boggles my mind because the idea has always been that the main wiki is not some elite place. That's the whole reason why it's successful in the first place. Anyone can get into it. And I guarantee you, just like I talked to all my patrons about this, like, if you follow my instructions and you learn nothing from me in doing so, you can still get something to stick on the wiki. Hopefully you learn something from me in the exchange and can do it on your own, but you don't have to. The minimum requirements to get something to reach plus 10 or plus 20 on the scp wiki are so incredibly low. And yes, for those of you out there who have tried writing for the wiki and have failed, that means that you're missing some very basic skillsets. But don't worry, everyone does at the start. The very first article I ever wrote for the wiki, it's the only wiki article I've ever written that was deleted off the site, was deleted off the site. And frankly, I did the same thing a lot of people do. I took that as an indication that I wasn't good enough, and I stopped. I didn't come back for two years. And in between those two events, in 2012 and 2014, I didn't write a whole bunch in other locations. But what I did when I came back was I recognized that I was bad and committed myself to improving. And I posted my first article, which survived, which frankly is not very good. And I posted a second article, which is pretty good. It's above average. And then I posted a third article, which was garbage again, four or five down the line, and another garbage article came out. But you know what's interesting about these garbage articles I'm talking about? They all survived. They're all still in the wiki. In fact, they're all above plus 50. Admittedly, they're five years old, so plus 50 is not exactly high, but they survived. And I know for a fact, you could talk to any number of authors out there, except for maybe DJ Cactus, who deletes his underperforming stuff, that they all have articles on the wiki that are not doing very well, and that they're probably not even very proud of, but they can't let it go. They can't kill it because they're just like, it's there, it's surviving. Maybe it's even got hundreds of upvotes. Sometimes you post something that's not very good and it somehow becomes incredibly popular. Because again, upvotes do not mean quality. They simply mean popularity. And just like the popular kid in high school might be a douchebag, that article of yours that gets to plus 300 might still be terrible. But, and this is important, low standards on the SAP wiki mean that you can fail, that you can produce bad things and still get recognition for it. That's the whole point of the SAP wiki. That's why it's good. But the most important thing you have to do, absolutely 100%, is not be happy with bad. There's a fine line between being happy with good enough and being too hard on yourself. Find the middle ground. Don't be happy with good enough, but accept that sometimes good enough is good enough. I mean, recently I looked on the SAP wiki to just check to see about some readings that I could possibly be doing. And I kept hitting the randomize button. And to be fair, this was at the time, I still kind of considered the idea that newer articles were so much better than older stuff. But I got a bunch of random tales and a bunch of random SAPs out of series four and series five that were not great. In fact, some of them were very bad and they were highly rated. What I'm saying is this, don't give up, regardless of if you have success or no success at all, because you have to understand that the SAP wiki does not have high standards. It simply has some standards, which means you just need to barely meet the minimum in order to succeed there. I'd like to thank two brand new patrons, Lael Diablo at $25 and Joni M. Smok at $5. I'd like to thank you and I'd like to thank all of the other patrons on the screen right now. You guys are what make this kind of content possible. Thank you very much for your support. It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here. And as for the rest of you, if you like the video, hit the subscribe button. And then hit the notification bell next to that so you're immediately notified when I upload a new video. You wouldn't want to miss it, would you? And thanks for watching. I'll see you on Thursday.