[Discussion] The State of -ARC

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[Discussion] The State of -ARC

OptimisticLucio 25 Dec 2021 10:12

05Command Mirror

So, about two months ago we internally discussed removing links to the -ARC'd SCPs from the series lists. While discussion seemed generally in favor, I think this calls for a bigger discussion about -ARC as a whole and any rules we may have left over regarding this designation.

So, the main points of discussion for this thread are:

1. What goal does the -ARC / Archived designation have nowadays, and what other methods do we have to achieve the same goal, if any?
2. What rules and exceptions do we have for Archived SCPs specifically?
3. Do we want to get rid of the designation?
4. Do we want to get rid of the articles?

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Ethagon 27 Dec 2021 00:31

My personal opinion:

1. Now, mostly preserving history. I think that's important and as others have said, they don't harm anything. And from what I've noticed they also serve, similar to SCPClassics, as fuel for rewrites

3. I think that's more down to how useful it is, from a technical and or administrative perspective. The only other benefit I can think of is that it "frees" the ARC designation more up for Authors to more freely use, without it being associated with Archived SCPS (although this is done already)

4. I personally like it if that's only done on a case by case basis in the way it was done with 252-ARC. I don't think unarchival needs much focus unless there is specifically a problem with a specific ARC. If the process is more streamlined, I think there'll be more focus on deciding whether or not each individual ARC should be deleted and I think there are other more important things that should have this focus instead.

Again Archived skips provide minor benefits, don't harm anything, and the processes we have f they do are fine IMO.

Edit: Woops, wrong place for this post

Last edited on 27 Dec 2021 00:33 by Ethagon Show more

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Decibelles 25 Dec 2021 11:07

What goal does the -ARC / Archived designation have nowadays, and what other methods do we have to achieve the same goal, if any?

As far as the goal of them goes, it is useful in preserving site history. After all, as far as I am aware, this doesn't seem to have changed:

Most often, it’s because an SCP is old and referenced in Tales, and its wholesale deletion would muddle works which reference it.

as many of these works are still referenced in various articles throughout. As for "other methods", well, there aren't really any equivalent ones. If an old article nowadays gets referenced in surviving works, but the article is in danger of deletion, what tends to happen is that the article gets rewritten or just outright deleted, and this doesn't necessarily solve the issue of the works it was referenced in retaining their same meaning. This isn't inherently a problem, but because archival is not really a thing anymore, context and site history gets lost, particularly if the rewrite of the new article doesn't retain enough identifiable characteristics to make it work within the context of the article it is referenced in. This was a huge reason for 049-ARC to exist.

What rules and exceptions do we have for Archived SCPs specifically?

The only real exceptions when it comes to -ARC are specifically in the case where either an article was chosen to be -ARC'd due to staff preference at the time, or when the -ARC rises to a certain positive rating to warrant reintegration into the mainlist. I do not think either of these situations are inherently bad or cause issues. There are, honestly, very few cases where an article was -ARC'd and the reasons behind it were, at best, incredibly tenuous. So I don't think the state of the -ARC list, as it stands right now, is an issue.

Do we want to get rid of the designation?

The designation should stay so readers can have a clear understanding of reference and separation between those articles and surviving ones. If it comes time to completely rehaul the entire -ARC list and which articles, if any, should stick around, then whichever SCP articles stick around from that should still have the designation. Otherwise, I don't know how you're going to get someone to tell the difference, just from looking at the title, between SCP-049 and SCP-049.

Do we want to get rid of the articles?

Very few should be removed. I still have a list that I made from the time I was an administrator of which articles I would support seeing removed and deleted entirely from the -ARC list. It is not a big list. I can provide said list with reasoning upon request.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Kothardarastrix 25 Dec 2021 12:03

1 - ARC preserves site history and necessary context when the deletion of a low-rated article would leave a hole in something that isn’t low rated. The only other way to really do that is by allowing a rewrite of the article and requiring it to maintain compatibility with existing crosslinks. That’s an imperfect system, though, because not many people will line up to rewrite these old-as-dirt skips. Even if they were, link-compatible rewrites often still end up extremely different from the original. Archival takes far less time and effort for everyone.

2 - ARC are allowed to be much lower rated than anything else, because they’re generally bad articles that have been preserved for the sake of articles that aren’t bad.

3- No! I see no problem with ARC; if public opinion of SCP-058 suddenly soured and it fell below -10, it isn’t fair to me that I’d have to rewrite that article or else the entire Drooling Path series, or just leave a gaping hole in my stories because an article that was foundational to my work was less popular than it.

4 - Well, I haven’t read all of these articles. Perhaps that’s a point in and of itself. Certainly those in the “Referential Integrity” section should stay. The “staff purview” ones would probably need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. But even that feels unnecessary to me. These ARCs aren’t hurting anybody. They’re difficult to find anyway, and few have seen them, but (and correct me if I’m wrong) it doesn’t seem like it’s costing anybody any time or effort to keep them there. So while some of them probably could be disposed of without rocking too many boats, I don’t really see any compelling reason to actually do it. I was against ending the archival process, and I’m likewise against ending the archives.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Decibelles 26 Dec 2021 11:36

To comment on the 05 thread:

Second Section is Staff Purview - I dislike anything that hints of Staff Fiat, so I can't really see any reason to keep most of these. If previous staff decided we could keep them, current staff can decide that we can chuck them.

This is fair, but then, the so-called "staff fiat" in this context really does not affect anything negatively or hurt anyone in any way. If you look at the majority of the Staff Purview articles that have been archived, a lot of them have been archived for fairly sensible reasons that still technically hold up. (A couple of these articles could even be moved under Referential Integrity.)

Ultimately, I agree with Kothardarastrix. On a broad scale, there really isn't much reason I can see to delete any of these, even the ones that I would be at least okay with seeing gone. They don't negatively affect the site in any way. In fact, you see people frequently commenting on wishing to rewrite these, or reference these, and discussion around them can still continue from time to time.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

OptimisticLucio 26 Dec 2021 15:56

On a broad scale, there really isn't much reason I can see to delete any of these, even the ones that I would be at least okay with seeing gone.

Ok to clarify - I don't actually think they should all just be nuked and that's it. My bigger issue is the fact that they can't be deleted no matter what the site ends up thinking of them, and some of them are really not that necessary to keep around.

Those who hold up can stick around, and the rest… well, people will vote on them.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Decibelles 26 Dec 2021 20:52

My bigger issue is the fact that they can't be deleted no matter what the site ends up thinking of them, and some of them are really not that necessary to keep around.

In the case of the former, I agree. I wouldn't mind there at least being some room for staff to be able to properly deal with the articles in the future. In the case of the latter, I still don't think keeping them around does the site any bad in any way. I also think it's the wrong perspective to look at this discussion with; see the first collapsible in my reply to LORDXVNV. While I'm using this subthread to comment on the 05 thread specifically, I might as well continue to offer my perspective:

so if we decided that 'other works relying on things' isn't a good enough reason to prevent deletion now, why is it good enough only because it happened five years ago?

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I also think this is the wrong way to look at this. Site culture now is different from site culture then. It's not a monolith where the culture remains immutable as things change. This is acknowledged here, but it's also glossed over. It was good enough all those years ago because the site emphasized preserving history in an era where the history was being wiped over and forgotten about due to a lack of foresight and the inherent struggle in figuring out what course of direction the site would take in the future. This also coincided with the fact that, at a certain point, it was really fucking hard to look back at site history and figure out exactly what happened with who and when and where, and even why. Stuff like the Attribution Metadata list is a natural extension of -ARCs as a way of keeping site history integral and intact.

Nowadays, this isn't that necessary, but it raises the question of what you do when the work that is being referenced in some other articles gets deleted. Rather than address this issue, or look into it, or talk about it, it seems like people are willing to just shrug and ignore that. I don't think it should be ignored; I think it should be the focus of the discussion. See my first collapsible response to LORDXVNV.

Back then, articles crosslinking was much more prevalent and important, and there were overall fewer stories on the site. When an article fell into deletion, there was a legitimate concern that it might end up being a whole in the web of interconnected fiction built up by various authors.

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How is this not the case now? I would argue that, if anything, crosslinking is more prevalent these days than it was in the era people commonly associate with crosslinking. The site in its current form thrives on the massive amounts of interconnectivity that occurs. We have a whole Wikiwalk process specifically to encourage this! Even back in the original Series 1 era, this would have never crossed people's minds. We have entire canons now that consist of specific authors' oeuvres that also reference other canons. No one would have dreamed of this. Not even the original example of a user wishing to pull all his work could have come up with something this grand of a scale. In that sense, I'd argue that the process of -ARC becomes more relevant now than it has been then. But we (as in staff; I am not part of staff) have collectively agreed that the process is outdated. So what do we do to ameliorate the situation? Therefore:

so taking the second step and releasing the ARCed articles into standard deletion process is the natural evolution of that.

Just allowing staff to have the ability to delete -ARCs isn't the solution; it's a single step in the process. It should not be the end goal.

The real question that needs to be answered is how to we handle the old pages? Do we just unarchive all of them and wipe are hands of it?

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By doing this, you allow future edge cases and issues to pop up again. It could happen at any time, to any article, for any reason. You will not expect it, and when it happens, it's going to be a pain for staff, and another huge issue to wrangle with. There won't be a process to deal with it. This will result in more bureaucracy ramming its ugly head in. It will result in more frustration from the community, and you will have to reconsider the whole process from scratch again. This is hindsight talking here! You absolutely need to think beyond just "unarchive and let the natural deletion process run its course". So in that regard:

Alternatively, should we make exceptions and allow select articles to grandfather over and remain archived? If we do decide to allow some fiction articles to remain, how do we actually do this? We can't just pick one at random and hold a vote every time so something needs to be planned that will address every single article at once.

This is the discussion I would rather see take place before it's decided to just open up the deletion process for these articles again. And not just that, what do you do about cases that could occur in the future? No matter how much it will suck to talk about it, it needs to be thoroughly talked about and discussed before something is done. More discussion now means exponentially less discussion in the future. And besides, like Koth and I have mentioned, these articles aren't going to hurt anybody in the time it takes for this long discussion to run its course.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

LORDXVNV 26 Dec 2021 17:19

What goal does the -ARC / Archived designation have nowadays, and what other methods do we have to achieve the same goal, if any?

Given that staff already more or less just recently passed a measure to unarchive things and delete things, and given that current staff voted against allowing for new Archivals without a single dissent… the only purpose of this is to preserve site history, I guess?

What rules and exceptions do we have for Archived SCPs specifically?

Exemption from deletion.

That's really about it.

Do we want to get rid of the designation?

I'm against this because of the existence of SCP-049-ARC and the absolute pain it'd be to post all of the existing ARCs to mainlist and update their backlinks/references. No need to wipe the slate clean even if it's already been decided there will be no more ARCs in the future.

Do we want to get rid of the articles?

Not as a blanket rule. A definite no for the administrative ones. I read through most of the SCPs; by and large they strike me as fairly rated for what they are.

I would suggest just removing their exemption from the deletions process, which I see is already an existing proposal. I personally don't feel these articles should get special treatment today just because the institution exists.

Like, staff already killed 252-ARC. Now, there was a very good reason to do so in that case specifically (it was a bomb that turns you gay), but like, the process was… unnecessarily bureaucratic. I mean, look at how the 05 thread describes it: http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-14167391/discussion-unarchival

I suspect there's a nearly certain chance this will be used again, given that the vote, again, was unanimous, and people are going to want to streamline the bureaucracy before it happens so it doesn't require an active staff quorum. I'm not going to speculate on how culture might shift to make other -ARCs more clearly problematic in coming years since as far as I can tell 252-ARC was egregious in that regard, but the fact it existed for so long AND had such a bureaucratic process to get deleted makes me side-eye the entire concept of ARCs.

So I'm approaching the below arguments with the mindset of "current staff will vote to kill -ARCs in one form or another no matter what we say against it."

As of the time of me posting this, there are 11 archived scps or tales below the deletion threshold. Of these 11, only 3 are for referential integrity. Proust's Lunchbox, Eberstrom's Proposal, and Joey.

I see Eberstrom's Proposal brought up on the 05 thread as important for the Classical Revival series, which 1) hasn't updated in 8 years 2) provides all of the context necessary to understand Eberstrom's proposal within itself 3) makes significant expansions on Eberstrom's proposal to the point where it's not even clear that they're the same thing (Classical Revival implements the idea in a significantly more interesting way imo).

Joey was archived for the tale Decomm Anon, which again… doesn't really use the SCP? The name 'Joey' comes up four times but like… nothing specific to it is actually incorporated into the story.

Proust's Lunchbox was archived for the tale Gourmet. This would actually be a loss, I think.

As for the other 8 in deletion range, as stated on the 05 thread on this topic, "If previous staff decided we could keep them, current staff can decide that we can chuck them."

Lastly, I do want to state I get where Kothardarastrix is coming from — it would suck if SCP-058 got deleted for the reasons they mentioned. That said. I would be immensely surprised if a >750 article ever fell into deletion range and I suspect there would be no shortage of people willing to rewrite it if it did.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Kothardarastrix 26 Dec 2021 18:08

Well, 058 was just the example I used because I actually have works based on it. A better example would be SCP-2068, which has been floating between 0 and 20 for its whole life. If I wrote a tale about it and it later bit the dust, that'd be a huge pain in my butt to deal with.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Decibelles 26 Dec 2021 20:33

but the fact it existed for so long AND had such a bureaucratic process to get deleted makes me side-eye the entire concept of ARCs.

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The issue with this line of thought is that it's impossible to predict the future. My first immediate issue with this thread honestly is "why did no one screenshot the SCP/discussion thread for this?", and worries me that in the future, if any -ARCs get deleted, we'll be gung ho about deleting without even doing so much as take screenshots. Unless I'm missing something in this 05 thread, the least that can be done is screenshotting.

At the time that these various SCPs have been archived, we had no way of really knowing what kind of trouble the process could cause. We worked on the assumption that these articles would remain relevant in some way, and that people would still enjoy reading them and seeing site history. In this manner, both of these things are still true, and 252-ARC was an anomaly in that regard. People still discuss these. People still have interest in them. They're not like the -Ds, where people flock to them and gawk at how bad they are. You see legitimate activity around the -ARCs again and again.

I think staff are approaching this from the wrong angle. This isn't a bad angle to take. But it's the wrong one to start with. What should be discussed isn't "what do we do with -ARCs right now?", but rather, "what safeguards/measures can we implement so that -ARC isn't needed in the future?". 049-ARC was born out of necessity. What could staff have done to not go through the -ARC process again while still preserving the integrity of the original and/or preserving the integrity of the works specifically referencing the specific version of 049-ARC? By focusing on the weeds of current -ARCs, you ignore the trees of future situations where this threatens to happen. Sounds melodramatic, but as a former admin, I'm aware of how often situations can come back to bite staff in the ass because they didn't consider the broader scale. It's impossible to predict the future, so you might as well try to prepare for it as best as possible, unlike how we did in the past.

I see Eberstrom's Proposal brought up on the 05 thread as important for the Classical Revival series, which 1) hasn't updated in 8 years 2) provides all of the context necessary to understand Eberstrom's proposal within itself 3) makes significant expansions on Eberstrom's proposal to the point where it's not even clear that they're the same thing (Classical Revival implements the idea in a significantly more interesting way imo).

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This is sort of irrelevant though, as without this specific interpretation of Site-19, Classical Revival would not be exactly what it was. It used the SCP to great advantage, much as how (to bring up an example already used in this thread, despite the stark differences in rating) The Drooling Path uses 058 to great advantage. Sure, that series goes to great lengths to provide the exact context needed for 058, and also utilizes the SCP better and more creatively than you could imagine just from the article. But without the article itself, it could not be what it is. A similar thing for Classical Revival occurs as well. And without the SCP, the context is lost, and there's a gap that's now been created. This is the thing with references. If you wanna be technical, it's not like that many of the tales desperately need the SCP they are referencing to work. But that sort of misses the point of referencing an SCP in a tale to begin with, or building a tale around an SCP.

Joey was archived for the tale Decomm Anon, which again… doesn't really use the SCP? The name 'Joey' comes up four times but like… nothing specific to it is actually incorporated into the story.

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Decomm Anon is a weird case, as stuff isn't explicitly crosslinked in that tale, and a lot of its references seem fleeting. But each of the decommed and archived SCPs in that tale are ancillary to the joke. Sure, any one of them individually don't do much. You could remove an individual article being referenced in the tale from the site without much damage. But they work as a whole together to provide context and support for what's going on. I wouldn't want to see any of the SCPs referenced in that tale gone.

As for the other 8 in deletion range, as stated on the 05 thread on this topic, "If previous staff decided we could keep them, current staff can decide that we can chuck them."

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This isn't a bad policy to adopt, per se. It's logical! Staff should have the ability to decide what remains and what doesn't. But previous staff, even in the case of -ARCs falling under Staff Purview, by and large archived stuff to preserve history and context in some way. Removing those articles then removes that history and context. There is a fine line to walk here. I have a personal concern that staff could feel a little too trigger-happy to get rid of the -ARCs just because they can now, because the -ARCs are a point of discussion. And judging by how 252-ARC didn't seem to get screenshotted and properly documented, I think this could result in a real loss of site history and content if similar processes follow.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Sirslash47 27 Dec 2021 08:56

The current ARC articles are ARC for history reasons. No new ones can be added but I honestly don't think they should be deleted. 252 was a good call though.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Ethagon 02 Jan 2022 13:35

In answer to this O5 post, I think that's probably the best solution, as long as they're still linked from at least one place.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Kothardarastrix 02 Jan 2022 14:14

Yep, that’s pretty much the perfect solution.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Decibelles 02 Jan 2022 15:32

Agreed. Use of SCP Classic should be encouraged if anything.

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

ObserverSeptember 04 Jan 2022 12:26

I'm frankly tired of staff's crusade against the -ARC system. The retiring of the -ARC system for fiction was done with the understanding that the current status of existing -ARCs would not be relitigated, and yet here we are trying to unarchive all of the existing ones yet again.

Not to be rude, but don't you have more important things to do?

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Roundabouts 04 Jan 2022 12:33

I don't know why the -ARC system should be removed. After all, it is still content and we still have archived SCPs for a reason. I'm against its removal generally, it's useless to remove it and staff is, as Observer said, doing something that isn't relevant or helpful at all. Not to be rude.

Removing -ARC SCPs is a bad idea. They're still SCPs and content overall. It's like removing mainlist SCPs, or at least to me.

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— Roundabout.

Last edited on 04 Jan 2022 12:34 by Roundabouts Show more

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

OptimisticLucio 05 Jan 2022 08:52

Removing -ARC SCPs is a bad idea. They're still SCPs and content overall. It's like removing mainlist SCPs, or at least to me.

As stated earlier in this thread: I don't think they should just be deleted and that's it, and seems that's not the supported measure on the O5 thread either.

Last edited on 05 Jan 2022 08:53 by OptimisticLucio Show more

Re: [Discussion] The State of -ARC

Kothardarastrix 13 Jan 2022 02:48

Something else to add- if the policy is changed, and the currently archived articles do go away, please let us all know in advance. Nobody wants to wake up one morning and find that we missed our chance save a copy for posterity or later rewriting.

(And I need time to inter them in SCP-5356.)

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