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Introduction
So, you want to make an account for the SCP Wiki. Before you do that, there's a few things we expect all users of the site to know, and the process to join is a tad less intuitive than you'd initially expect. This guide will hopefully make both aspects as clear as can be.
What Should You Know
After making an account and joining the wiki, you'll have the ability to post articles to the wiki, vote and comment on existing ones, post to the forums, and interact with the site in many other ways. Because of this, there's a good number of rules that we expect people with this kind of freedom to follow, and we'll outline some of the more important rules here:
- Don't be a Dick. This should go without saying, but still. Don't be an asshole to your fellow members, including but not limited to - harassment, personal targeting, racism, homophobia, transphobia, telling people "your article sucks balls" without explaining why it sucks balls, telling people "your article sucks balls" in general because I'm sure there's better ways you can phrase that, vandalism, spam, the list goes on. There are thousands of different, colorful ways of being an absolute annoyance to your fellow users. Don't do those.
- Don't Vandalize. Mentioned it above, but to elaborate, "vandalism" is defined as non-dismissable changes to another person's article without their explicit permission. In a less robotic way, don't make changes to other people's articles beyond fixing a misspelling or broken CSS item without them allowing you to do so beforehand. Adding a forgotten rating module or changing "chooclate" to "chocolate" is fine. Adding unnecessary elements or changing existing sentences outright is not.
- Don't Roleplay. Not onsite, at least. Users on the site are expected to not talk like they actually live in the SCP universe. The Foundation is fictional, and participating in the wiki is meant to be out-of-character.
These are the more important rules you're expected to know. For a more thorough list of rules, check the site rules list.
Staff Procedures
The rules of this site and the procedures that govern it are made to help the wiki run smoothly and make the user's experience as comfortable as can be, so it would only make sense for the users to be able to see what happens and have a say in the proceedings.
All non-sensitive staff actions, along with any policy discussions, rule changes, etc, are logged on the 05Command wiki, which is separate from the SCP Wiki. On here you can see most things related to staff's work, including the individual teams' composition, recent changes to the site, internal discussions, and so on and so forth. While normal site members cannot directly comment on 05Command proceedings, we have the Staff Policy Discussion forum category, where all users can comment on said policy discussions as they occur.
Additionally, once you've been active for a while and feel like you can help contribute to the site's functioning, consider signing up to one of the semi-frequent staff recruitment threads on the site forums.
The Wiki & Wikidot
The SCP Wiki is hosted on a platform called Wikidot, which includes within it a number of other wikis: A DnD community wiki, Half-Life mod lists, a comprehensive detailing of every concert Bruce Springsteen has ever done for some reason… Within those, stands the SCP Wiki as well, so to join you'll first need to make a Wikidot account, and then apply for an SCP Wiki membership.
On the top-right corner of your screen you should see a sign-up/log-in button. If not, go here. Sign up to the platform1 (if you have any issues with that go to the official chatrooms and ask around), and then you need to apply for membership on the wiki. When applying to the wiki you'll see a small section where you can put text, where you're expected to include the sentence "I will treat all community members with respect, and I will follow Site Rules", and exactly nothing else.
If you've properly done the previous steps, in a few days you should be a member of the wiki.
Wikidot Is A Platform
An important thing to note, however, is that membership to the SCP Wiki doesn't automatically include membership to any of the wiki's sub-platforms, such as the SCP Sandbox (a place to post Works-in-Progress) and the official chats (self-explanatory), since they're technically separate locations. Joining the sandbox is explained on the sandbox proper, and joining the chat is explained in the chat guide. Any additional platforms will also have their own sign-up process.
Additionally, our hosting platform has a few… quirks. For example, there is no in-built notification system, so you are not alerted when people respond to your forum posts or articles; this was solved by a few SCP users creating a custom notification service. Additionally, wikidot seems to not work with any email that has numbers in it, so sign-ups and such just break if your account has digits in it. Same goes for the Facebook Integration; if you use it, your account will break.
Our platform is not the best, and comes with many of its own quirks and glitches, but we work with what we have. It is important to remember that if something doesn't work right, you're likely not the first person to discover this issue, and the chatrooms will almost certainly help you deal with the problem.
Welcome to the site!