Meet the Interviewer - WhiteGuard
WhiteGuard was a pleasure to work with throughout the entire process. As an utmost professional, humble, and hard-working in every way, WhiteGuard's interview proved to be the most natural interview I have ever conducted. At times, it felt like he was asking the questions himself! When I first approached him concerning my interview request, he graciously obliged. ~ 
WhiteGuard
WhiteGuard has been a member of this site since the 17th of December, 2014, and as of the time of writing, he has contributed a total of 1 SCP Article, 0 Tales, 0 GoI Formats, and 22 other pages on the site. WhiteGuard's most popular page on the site by rating is Interviewing Icons - The Administrator, FritzWillie at +164. He became a member of Junior Staff on the 9th of May, 2020 by joining the Community Outreach Team and later the Maintenance and Ancillary Staff Team and the Licensing Team. On the 10th of October, 2020, he was promoted to Operational Staff, In addition to his staff work, he happens to be our non-official site interviewer with his 2 excellent series of interviews called Meet the Administrators and Interviewing Icons. The following interview will consist of 11 questions from myself and 4 questions from the community with his responses.
The bold text represents the questions whereas the text within the boxes are WhiteGuard's responses.
Interview Questions:
First off, it is an absolute honor to be doing this interview with you. May I ask, as I do with all of my interviews, how exactly did you come across the SCP wiki?
Haha thank you for the opportunity, WhiteGuard, the pleasure is mine. As for your question, back in mid-2014, I was creating thumbnails for a friend's YouTube channel. As per usual, he sent me the details of the next game he would be playing and what he wished for the title to be. One day, the game happened to be SCP: Containment Breach. I went ahead and made the thumbnails for him and later watched his playthroughs like always. However, this game caught my eye, so I decided to check it out. When gaming, I have always been a lore-centric guy. So when I began regularly playing the game, I started to read the SCP documents in the game and enjoyed the concept. When I found the link to the wiki through the game's website, I thought it would be a good opportunity to check out the source material for the game. I had no idea what I was about to get myself into.
Fascinating and what happened after you found the site?
Well, I got to reading! At the time, tales were not emphasized on the site, so I predominately stuck to the mainlist articles. From December of 2014 to sometime in the summer of 2015, I had read every SCP article on the site, which included something around 2500 articles at the time.
With that much reading, you must have contributed so much in terms of reviews, comments, votes, even writing of your own, right?
Eh, not exactly. You see, when I was first on the site, I was not confident in my ability as a writer or even a reviewer. I was a 15 to 16-year-old kid and felt my opinion didn't matter. Despite having a lot of knowledge on lore with the mass amount of reading I did, I still felt that I would be in over my head in regards to evaluating others' writing on any level. My comments were few and far between, I never reviewed a thing, and my votes were sporadic as I often forgot it was even a feature.
At what point did you decide to contribute then?
Well, after I finished my goal of reading all of the articles on the site, I simply ran out of material to read and left. As I mentioned, I never read any tales back then, and I was not confident enough to contribute myself.
What brought you back?
Does the love for the Foundation ever really leave you? I had fond memories of my experience with the wiki. After reading articles, I would check out the comments and familiarize myself with the authors and people at the time. Although I did not comment often myself, I was still familiar with who was who. At times, I missed the community, but other things were happening in my life. My hiatus lasted for 4 1/2 years. I still hopped in to read an article from time to time, but that was not what brought me back. It was actually stumbling on the SCP YouTubers such as The Exploring Series, TheVolgun, and SCP ILLUSTRATED that piqued my interest again. I returned in the winter of 2019, a person confident in himself and ready to take on the wiki once more.
And what did you do upon your return?
Haha well I simply got back to reading! After all, I had another 2500+ articles to catch up on! As I started to get caught up on what all happened while I was away, I gained the urge to contribute to the wiki that I had gained so much from. My first goal was to create an SCP. I wanted to create one that I could feel a personal connection to. After a couple of months of going through the process, I came out with my first article, SCP-5151: Chivalry Never Dies. I understand that the article has its flaws, and I happen to know what many of them are. However, it is an article that I am pleased with and proud of. Even if people downvote it in the future and it is removed from the site, I will always cherish the experience of creating it and what it became.
If you had to say, what would be your favorite SCP?
If I had to pick, I could only narrow it down to my favorite 5 SCPs. In no particular order, they are SCP-015: Pipe Nightmare, SCP-1730: What Happened to Site-13?, SCP-3001: Red Reality, SCP-3034: The Counting Station, and SCP-3300: The Rain. 015 was the first SCP I read on the site where my jaw dropped. It is a fantastic article that also helped me get hooked into the site along with many of the originals. I have a great fondness over the original articles of the site. 1730 took me for a ride the first time and then left me somewhere else entirely after the major edit. I happened to enjoy both parts of the ride. 3001 was actually the SCP that made me want to return to the site. The Exploring Series did a video on it and it helped spark my passion once again. 3034 is one of the best articles on this site, period. I don't care about any differing opinions on that one. 3300's narrative drew me in and ended up being one of the articles I have enjoyed reading the most to this day.
Favorite 001 proposal?
That would be Mann's Proposal: The Spiral Path. Obviously, many of the 001 proposals happen to be some of the best works on the site. However, Mann's was the first one I read back in the day. It used to be my favorite, and although I have read most of the others, Mann's continues to be my favorite to this day. When I think of 001, I think of the Spiral Path.
Why did you want to become part of the staff?
As I mentioned before, I want to contribute to the site I love. I have received so much enjoyment from this site that I feel compelled to help it where I can. For now, this includes interviewing staff for the Site News hub, keeping the staff site updated, keeping certain guides on the site updated, and ensuring images on the site are CC compliant. Both of these roles I enjoy immensely. It is a pleasure to introduce new users with helpful tips for the site and seeing which ones become prosperous. As for maintaining the staff site, I feel like it is a way I can help out staff directly. Regardless of whether or not I am ever promoted from my position as junior staff, I hope what I have done and what I continue to do is helping the wiki in some capacity. This is what I said before I was promoted to operation staff in the Fall of 2020. It has been a great ride thus far.
So onto the topic of interviews, why bother with them?
Well, I was inspired by an interview with "The Administrator". I read it some time ago but decided to reread it as I forgot how it went. As a history buff, I was curious if there were any other written interviews like this one on the site. Unfortunately, I did not find any. This inspired me to begin a series where I interview the current administration to try to both preserve history while also bringing awareness to the community of who the administrators were. After a successful start to the series, I decided to begin another series as well to interview various authors on the site to show the community the types of people who are writing what they are enjoying. The rest is history.
So, what about █████? What [REDACTED]?
[DATA EXPUNGED]
Community Asked Questions:
What is the best kind of house? ~ 
Rounderhouse
Why a Yurt house, of course!
How do you become such a prolific interviewer with the accomplishment of maintaining the highest total rating for written interviews on the site? ~ 
djkaktus
Such a flattering question. Really, it just took a lot of hard work, some deep research, a bit of luck, and some great interviewees to work with.
Why? ~ 
Tanhony
Because I can, Tan, because I can.
How does it feel to be a legend, kid? ~ 
Dr Gears
Never as legendary as you, Gears.
This concludes the interview. I hope you enjoyed it! I would once again like to thank WhiteGuard for agreeing to do this with me. Thanks again to the community members who provided questions: Rounderhouse, djkaktus, Tanhony, and Dr Gears. My last interview will be with 
TheScarletKing. If you have any questions for him you would like for me to ask, feel free to leave them in the discussion portion of this page, and I will choose my favorites from among them.
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