As some of you may already be aware, staff have decided to launch the Lost Series soon. But what is this all about? Why? Let's talk to the main person behind it, DrBleep, to find out!
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today about the Lost Series. So, let's start from the top. What is the Lost Series?
The Lost Series is a non-standard main list series of articles with a unique and distinct theme. Most main list series don’t have a dedicated theme, outside of the articles which were written as part of their K-contests. While I expect there will be people who don’t stick to this core thematic, I think we have done something unique and interesting by challenging people to write within that thematic element.
In terms of what I’m even rambling on about, The Lost Series is what it says on the tin. These are SCPs which have been lost, through corruption, being misplaced, actively removed, or outright destroyed. They should have, in theory, been inaccessible to you, the reader. Through some extraordinary circumstances, a glitch in the universe, stumbling upon some forgotten recovery program, fishing out a file from the trash, you now have access to these lost files.
The purpose of this series is to challenge the authorbase and readers, to inspire new and unique twists to the utilization of the format and the inherently customisible nature of Wikidot to tell new and interesting stories. It would also be disingenuous to not mention the real reason it came about, which was to solve an escalating slot crisis. Said crisis would have, otherwise, forced the arrival of an early 10k contest. The userbase and contests team would not have been ready for such an event, and would likely have contributed feelings of event burnout, and contest fatigue. While there were other solutions being proposed, to address a large perceived gap in quality, drops in readership, etc, those proposals needed more time in the oven and concentrated policy drives.
Thus the Lost Series was born.
A series of chaotic weeks of discussion revolving around a highly contentious threshold proposal. The actual piecing together of the initial discussion for the Lost Series was a fairly improvised event following the sudden eureka moment during a staff discussion. We were in the middle of spitballing potential ideas to resolve a potential slot crisis, which ranged from the early release of Series XI pre-10k contest, to the immediate initiation of a double kcon, to multiple other options. The truth is, everyone seemed to agree that the release of a 1000 slots outside of the normal mainlist was the best approach. From there, the question became how to handle that. During those discussions there was a small exchange where the sudden thought came to me: “SCPs that have been Lost”. From there, everything began to fall into place as the whole room erupted with inspiration.
I then pieced together the discussion with thematic flavor text over the course of an hour or two when I got home from work. What followed was an immediate vibe shift in the community and a week long discussion that spawned multiple creative suggestions for various aspects of the proposal.
When it came to the time for the vote, it became fairly apparent that the discussion may have created too many creative suggestions. I’ve received some flack for the way the vote was set up, but honestly, I don’t know that we could have set it up in another way that would have guaranteed mostly clean results given the number of preferential options.
In terms of the actual creation and ironing out the Series page, that largely came down to the ingenuity of multiple staff members, particularly UncannyClown and Flagsam, who created the flavor text and the logo. It seemed really straightforward to roll out the page with the classical theme. A callback to the early days of the wiki that just honestly fits the concept of database entries lost in the cracks.
Will the 001 slot be treated any different than the traditional SCP-001 slot?
Yes, by staff vote the L001 slot will become a hub page for what we’re calling “Lost” or “Rejected” proposals. We don’t quite know what that page will look like formatting and presentation wise, but we’re expecting that these articles will thematically fit into the idea of 001 proposals which were cast aside or rejected from the main entries. What that will look like I think is largely up to the author and readerbase.
I noticed that the 173 slot is reserved. Can you tell me a little about that?
Afraid I can’t say anything about that at this time.
What was the thought process behind the new logo for the Lost Series?
So, what most people on the wiki likely won’t know unless they are really into the deep history of the site, is that Wikidot was not our first host. After 4chan, the SCP wiki temporarily made its home on a site known as edit-this. There are many bespoke ‘myths’ or ‘rumors’ about the early edit-this site, and among them is the conception of a very early logo used prior to the Josie the half-cat logo that last until we jumped to wikidot. That early logo is discussed with much frustration and fanfare about our site historians (especially Pedagon) who have been desperately searching for years for any trace of an image file or some hints of the appearance.
At this point what we know is, that first logo was a dinosaur, the silhouette of a triceratops. The dimensions, the contours, and the quality have all been lost to the sands of internet history. So, in the spirit of this Series, we have gone back in time and reimagined what that logo would look like. To this in, the incredibly talented Flagsam has hand drawn and crafted a triceratops logo for the Lost Series.
What type of articles do you expect to see as part of the Lost Series?
What I am hoping to see is a diverse array and intepretations of the core theme of articles which have been lost in the cracks between the database. I am hoping the community conforms to the thematics of the Series and produces some amazing quality work, and I genuinely hope that we get some truly inspired pieces. I hope the community also is not afraid to hold these articles to a higher standard than they normally would. As a limited series the value of these slots cannot be understated, and I hope the community will rise to meet that challenge. Beyond those hopes, I cannot begin to truly imagine the depths of creativity that will blossom in the months to come. I only know it will be a renaissance for the site.
Do you have any plans to write for this new series?
I have been hard at work on a piece that I hope to have not terribly long after the Series open. It will, in the spirit of this series, tread well beyond the normal constraint’s of the wiki’s genre, capture the essence of what it means for something to be truly lost to the sands of time, and hopefully recapture a sense of scale I have not attempted in a long time.
Trans rights? Y/N?
TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.