BW Media Spotlight

Here’s a form of storytelling I wouldn’t have even thought to discuss on Art Of Storytelling, which will be returning soon I promise. The wiki was born from Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that can be edited by anybody. The project meant well, but with conflicting points of view vying for their perspective to be dominant whether they’re right about a given fact or not–or knowingly obscuring facts that conflict with their world view or what they want others to believe–it isn’t always the resource they think it is. However, by design it is simply a place to share information. The rise of fan wikis, wikis created by fans to catalog a favorite series or franchise, and creator wikis, a way for a project’s creator to keep track of their stories for themselves as much as their fans, have created a new way to store and share information, lore and history. It’s a way to catalog fiction.

The SCP Foundation wiki however is a way to create fiction. The site pretends to be a collection of the disturbing monsters secretly running around the world. Not like werewolves as I understand it but the unnerving “creepypasta” type stuff. I don’t really follow horror so I’m not completely familiar but I believe it works like this: you create one of these creatures, their strengths, their weaknesses, and what body horror method it prefers to kill by. You submit it to the site and if approved it become part of the SCP files. (The name stands for “Secure, Contain, Protect”.) Working under a Creative Commons license these creatures may show up in some indie games or comics, usually as flavor text but sometimes as the actual threat of the story, with all credit given to the person who created the creature in the first place. While not my kind of thing I can appreciate the creativity and community coming from such a project.

So of course someone has to come along to ruin the fun. Thanks to loopholes and corruption someone in Russia is trying to take over the Russian version of the site and the creations that are a part of it. As MatPat from Game Theory reports in the below video this may threaten the very nature of Creative Commons, not to mention a terrible thing to do to the creators who worked hard on this project.

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