Community Vote on Harmony's Articles 2021
This is a rank choice preference community vote to select the fate of non-collaborative, non-coauthored, and non-essay articles written and posted by pixelatedharmony, former SCP Wiki Site Administrator, author, and user. This includes in the range of 200+ SCPs, tales, GoI formats, and 001 Proposals. The following proposals are based on the statements of the community members in a thread that only community members (Junior staff, non-operational chat staff, and members) could post to.
Only community members may vote. Operational staff, Moderators, and Administrators will not be allowed to participate. Junior staff, chat staff who are not ranking site members, and normal members will be permitted to vote. To prevent the creation of new sockpuppeting accounts, staff will be closing acceptance of applications as of 8:00 A.M. Eastern the day of this vote being posted until the end of the vote. To control for any sockpuppets already on the site, the vote will be restricted to users who had voted on, edited, or commented on the SCP Wiki prior to announcement of the vote. Votes in violation of this will be stricken and ignored. Users found to be attempting to rig or tilt the vote using multiple accounts will be subject to an immediate permanent ban from the site on all accounts. Users may change/alter their vote until the end of the voting period.
This vote will close exactly one week (7 days) from posting.
Community Members may vote for one or more proposals using rank choice preference, if a user feels a proposal is completely against the interests of the site and/or community, and does not wish to lend it weight, an option has been included to facilitate said expression. An example and explanation of the response choices is shown below using the required voting code-block:
| Proposal | Preference |
|---|---|
| Proposal I | 3 |
| Proposal II | 2 |
| Proposal III | 1 |
With each number bearing the following meaning:
3 - Most preferred. Assigned 3 points in tabulation.
2 - Second most preferred. Assigned 2 points in tabulation.
1 - Least preferred. Assigned 1 point in tabulation.
0 - Not preferred / Prefer to not give weight to the proposal. Worth 0 points in tabulation.
All votes must be formatted using the coding block in the collapsible below, for ease of staff tabulation. Users should copy and paste the coding block into their thread response, and replace the ''X'' with their rank preference.
Upon closing of the vote, staff will tabulate and announce the results of the community vote. The proposal with the most tabulated points will dictate the community's and staff's approach to handling Harmony's articles. This is binding: Staff will respect and adhere to the community's decision, regardless of the proposal selected, and the amount of work that will be necessitated to meet the community's wishes. Staff will begin preparing infrastructurally and organizationally via policy and proposals to effectively implement the chosen proposal, and may begin these preparations internally prior to the end of the vote if one proposal is the clear preference among the community.
Users may specifically indicate if they prefer to include or exclude the addenda for the proposals that they are relevant for.
Proposals:
Proposal I
Status quo. No works will be removed.
The Licensing Team will be consulted as to whether (and how) to remove Harmony's author attribution, per the legal terms of the license and her request not to be associated with her former works.
Additionally, per the instructions she left on her author post, all of Harmony's work will be open for rewriting by anyone who wants to, so long as the rewrite does not cause harm or create significant discrepancies to other existing fiction. Works for rewrite will be preferentially awarded, especially in the case of lore/canon significant works, to requesting authors who have written pieces that are directly or indirectly impacted by said articles.
[OPTIONAL] ADDENDUM 1A: Additionally, remove and repost all Harmony's work on the site using a neutral staff account (similar to The Administrator IE "TheCommunity", under a name dissociated with Harmony or Staff), stripped of author attribution.
Pros:
- Site lore and canons will be preserved and pieces built upon Harmony's works will be unaffected.
- Authors who have active investment in seminal lore/canon and even standalone pieces written by Harmony are afforded the opportunity to rewrite/modernize said pieces encouraging creative reimagination.
- Backlink, Wikiwalk Crosslinks, and other maintenance elements will not need to be fixed.
- If 1A is included, Harmony's attribution will be cleared, partially fulfilling her request and desire to detach herself from her former works, and will be blunted from harassing a neutral, anonymous staff account.
- Minimizes the overall amount of work necessary from staff and the community, and stretches active work out over a longer period of time allowing staff to split-focus between rewrites and other efforts to improve the site and community engagement.
- Contests can be used as a medium for rewrite of highly visible and prominent articles not impacting other site lore/canon dependent pieces.
- This proposal was the most supported in the Townhall thread, and is highly supported among staff.
Cons:
- Harmony's wishes are not completely filled.
- Including 1A will require a decent amount of short term effort and locking down slots in order to repost under a staff account.
- Harmony will likely continue to harass staff members.
Proposal II
Remove all of Harmony's works on the site. Individual community members may choose to make a public repository of their own accord.
Certain SCP slots may be temporarily taken under staff purview to avoid chaos (for example, a contest could be held for an in-demand slot of any kind).
Pros:
- Harmony's request is completed in both the spiritual and literal sense.
- Slots in Series I and II are made available to the userbase to fill with more modern writings, increasing visibility.
- Contests may be used to fill Series I and II slots and to provide reimaginings of Harmony's Seminal works.
- Harmony's works would be preserved in offsite venues.
- Harmony probably stops harassing Staff and SCP Wiki users.
Cons
- Site lore/canons built upon Harmony's material will be damaged, leaving holes in continuity and themes for a large contigent of material.
- Visibility of lore/canon built upon works by Harmony will be impacted by removal and into offsite archives.
- Site navigation will be damaged necessitating large staff cleanup efforts to correct hundreds of backlinks, wikiwalk crosslinks (As many of Harmony's articles were used in the initiative in both directions due to wikiwalk being Harmony's brainchild), inline crosslinks, and hubs.
- Actively deleting, recording deletions, and fixing all navigational/maintenance aspects will require weeks of work, diverting staff effort away from Wikiwalk 4.0, navigation improvements, and other quality of life improvements for the site.
- Deleting all these articles increases the likelhood of people trying this again, unless there is a policy change.
- Because Harmony had an extremely high level of collaboration with other authors, deleting her articles may have a severe chilling effect on future site collaborations, including referencing existing SCPs and building new canons, because authors will know that their collaborators may remove their work (and make collaborations potentially unintelligible) at any time. This may be the case even if mass deletion policy is changed going forward.
Proposal III
Step 1: Staff deletes all of Harmony's works per her request
Step 2: On a "request basis" Staff restores the works to the wiki on an anonymous staff account under a name dissociated from Harmony or Staff. This account will be named "TheCommunity".
Requests could be either by affected authors, or literally anyone if the community and staff wished.
Pros:
- Harmony's request is partially adhered to, in that all her articles are deleted and attribution cleared.
- Harmony's seminal/influential works on which other works rely may be restored on request, minimizing damage.
- Backlinks, wikiwalk crosslinks, inline crosslinks, and hub links will not require fixing by staff for requested reuploads.
- Anonymous requests for reupload can be used to avoid Harmony's harassing behavior against the requesting user.
Cons:
- Initial deletion will require large effort for proper recording, as well as storing works in staff kept/user kept offsite archives in the event of reupload requests.
- Crosslinks, backlinks, navigational elements, and hub links broken by the initial wave of deletion will either remain broken until request for a reupload, or have to be fixed months later after no request is made to reupload a given piece.
- Reuploading works in this fashion will vastly increase the effort made in deleting them.
- Harmony will harass staff members for reuploading works unchanged.
Please note, we were aware of Lt. Flops' proposal, and considered what it would take to accomplish, IE the creation of a separate category in which Harmony's articles could be reposted by a staff account and locked and allowed to proceed through a normal article lifespan. This proposal was ultimately unreasonably untenable beyond the means of staff's capabilities, likely requiring months of immediate demanding effort to properly implement, including fixing all appropriate backlinks, wikiwalk crosslinks, hub links, and navigation elements. Thus, with input from Lt Flops, staff folded her proposal into Proposal I, as we felt proposal I best captured the spirit if not the literal text of of Flop's proposal.
Staff will be following conversation and the results of the vote closely. At the end of the voting period, Staff will release a copy of the spreadsheet used to track and calculate the voting tabulations for the sake of utmost transparency and so that the community can double check our math. We are all human and want to make sure we get this right, and give the opportunity for the community to catch any hiccups we may not catch.
Non-vote related proceedings:
Additionally, whichever proposal is selected by the community, staff fully intend on pursuing policy discussions on two items that have been widely discussed by users during this incident.
- Possibly removing the blanket-deletion-upon-request policy, replacing it with a more nuanced policy that will still allow us to show we highly respect author autonomy while not also allowing for deletions that would severely damage the community. Author autonomy has long been one of the core principles of the wiki and we are loathe to abandon it entirely as many have suggested, but some sort of compromise involving exceptional circumstances is worthy of a discussion given the widespread sentiments expressed in the Town Hall thread.
- Creating some informal/formal guidance or expectation of increasing engagement with the community. Experience during this affair has shown many in staff that in high profile crises and incidents, transparency and communication with the community at large generates goodwill among the community towards staff, and greatly improves/decreases the stress level of staff while increasing formal trust in both directions. As the amount of work required to run the wiki has grown over the years, many staff have been too consumed by it to interact with the community as much as we used to. We want to fix that.
Also cause a couple folks have done this now, please remember to hit "New Post" at the bottom of the page rather than directly replying to this post.
A number of people who commented on this issue have subsequently received unwanted PMs.
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On Settings select any option other than "all registered" and click "Apply".
