Guide For Reading

Introduction

If you're new to the SCP wiki, or returning to it after a while, you may be confused about the best way to approach it. Unlike most forms of fiction, there is no canon or central storyline. While it's liberating to be told that you can technically start anywhere, even with a completely random SCP, having too many options and not understanding what's going on is an issue newcomers often face.

This guide will focus more on navigating the site and finding new material to read rather than giving details about the fictional Foundation. If you just want to dive in and immerse yourself in the setting, there's an in-character introduction from the perspective of a new recruit to the Foundation.

Navigational Elements

There's a few page elements on SCP Articles that you may not see on other sites: Collapsibles, Tabs, and Footnotes. If you already know how these three work, feel free to skip to the next section.

Collapsibles are used to organize long, convoluted articles into multiple short blocks. They typically look like a normal link with a plus sign (+) at the start, although the plus symbol is optional.

Where should I start reading?

While the obvious thing to do would be to read the SCPs in order, starting at 001 and working your way up, there's a few reasons why we don't recommend this. The first is that Series I, SCP-002 to SCP-999, contains the oldest works on the site, having been written as far back as 2008. While we're fond of Series I, we like to think we've improved as a writing community over time, and if you only read the first series you'll be missing out on our more recent work. We also have a lot of fiction that's not written in the SCP format on the site, and you'll miss these tales if you only read SCPs.

SCP-001 itself is another matter entirely, because there is no single article called SCP-001. The slot is instead left open to allow any author to write a proposal for what SCP-001 might be. Most of these proposals present themselves as the first or most important SCP, and they tend to be much wider in scope than a regular article. We definitely recommend checking them out at some point, but they're not intended to be the first SCP you read, and you'll probably understand them better if you read some other articles first.

Reading Recommendations

  • If you want to read "the classics", our most popular articles are listed on Top Rated Pages. However, part of the reason these are so highly rated is because they've been around for a long time. Try the New Pages Feed and Top Rated Pages from this month for our newer content, or Top Rated Pages By Year to get a better idea of how the site has progressed and changed over time.
  • If you want to get more specific recommendations, feel free to ask in any of the community spaces, official or unofficial. We also have suggestions grouped by genre in User-Curated Lists and the Curated Tale Series.
  • Although we don't have a single canon that all articles follow, we do have a number of canons intended to be more consistent. Think of these as shared universes that multiple authors can write in, building on each others' work. If the premise of the canon sounds interesting to you, it's worth checking out the articles in it.

There's a lot more we could recommend, including Artwork, Joke SCPs, the Wanderer's Library (our official sister site), and various branches writing in other languages, with translations into English compiled here. However, we've probably given you enough already. Pick a page, follow any links you find interesting, and you'll soon have more to read than you know what to do with!

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