The Collections Team is the branch of the SCP wiki concerned with creating and maintaining Collections for the site. Collections are groupings of site works based on the genre of their content, or based on their shared thematic elements. More specifically, the responsibilities of the Collections Team includes:
- Formulating new ideas for genres and themes that will make up new collections.
- Reading and subsequently adding every tale into at least one collection of each type.
- Fielding suggestions from users on new genres and themes for collections as necessary.
- Reviewing and approving new additions to specific collections during the staff-run phase.
- Contacting authors upon the addition of their existing works into a collection.
- Generating the layout for new collections and writing one-line descriptions of each work.
If you have any questions or concerns, please inquire in #site100 or message a member of the team.
What is a Collection?
Broadly, collections are lists of works (presently, only tales) based upon shared characteristics. Our current initiative consists of staff-curated/populated collections of two broad categories: genre, and theme.
Genre and Theme Collections are pretty much exactly how most readers find new works to read in, say, a library or a book store, which is how we want to encourage greater readership. An important aspect of this is that we can create sub-collections within a larger collection. For example, an all-purpose "Horror" collection encompasses a great deal of tales, but could be refined into sub-collections for "Existential Horror," "Body Horror," "Gruesome Horror," etc. This enables readers to find more specifically a tale in the flavor that they're seeking to read, or perhaps just browse a genre at will.
Thematic collections also serve their own purpose for readers perhaps looking to read a style of tale. This could be "Featuring Senior Staff," "Dialogue-Heavy," "Queer Characters," or more. This is for readers who are perhaps looking to read about something, rather than looking to read a tale set in a specific mood.
Why are we doing this?
Tale discovery sucks. Plain and simple. At present, we have nearly 4000 tales, and our only means of finding entirely new tales consists of using the Random Tale button, or finding tales by author/creation date. None of these fundamentally address how most people want to find content, which tends to be through similar genres, narrative structures, or even page length. Right now, if no one remembers that a specific tale exists, the only way to find it may be to look for it alphabetically.
Concurrently, this is an issue that is getting worse. The longer we put it off, the more tales will be added to the wiki that will only increase our work down the line. Collections aim to re-organize how we list tales by placing them into a format that encourages easy access to finding more tales that match what someone wants to read.
Why am I here?
You are being asked to help us go through the gargantuan task of categorizing every single tale on the site. The end goal of this project is to place every single tale on the site into at least one collection in each category: genre and theme. This will ensure that each tale can be found through some other means than knowing its name-think of this as WikiWalk but for tales.
Your responsibility is to help us read all of the tales, writing two sentence descriptions for them, and then bin them into an appropriate collection while putting forward ideas for more collections. Sound fun? If so, hit up the next tab for more detailed instructions.
The Master Work Sheet is located here. Request access and Lazar will grant it: http://scp.bz/collections
Extra note: Mark any tales with adult content separately.
Step 1
Consult the Master Log sheet in the Google spreadsheet. Be aware of which account you sign in with-usernames and emails are visible by default.
Step 2
Find the tale that you're about to read in the log. All entries are sorted by chronology. Feel free to begin with ones you've already read!
Important note: We are keeping tale series as one entry, listed by their first chapter and/or hub page. If you find a later chapter in the master log, claim it as per usual, but do not add any keywords, and just add a link to the first entry for the description. Proceed as normal for the actual first entry. Exercise discretion when reading entries of a tale series. Those of substantially different content should be tagged separately while those of similar content can inherit their 'Series' tags. We are more inclined to treat very short series as a single unit while very long ones should likely be broken up. Please use the Notes column to keep track of tale series. Additionally, include the link to the first entry of the tale series in the description.
Step 3
Mark the tale as Claimed by writing your name in the Claimed column. This prevents anyone from accidentally wasting their time by reading the same tale as you.
If for whatever reason you end up not reading the tale, remember to unclaim it!
Step 4
Read the tale. This step's pretty easy.
Step 5
After finishing the tale, add some keywords to the entry on the master log. Try to come up with at least five. It doesn't really matter what they are.
Next, add a one or two sentence description of the tale to the sheet. Keep this succinct, and try to avoid spoilers about the plot. You want to get the reader interested, not spoil the details.
Do not add any collections yet. We'll do that once we have a full list of collections.
Step 6
Extra optional step: Help us contribute to the growing list of collections on the later tabs of the sheet.
We are aiming to create descriptions that accomplish two things:
- Create a teaser for the audience so that they want to read the tale
- Summarize the contents of the tale as succinctly as possible.
To that end, it's important to shoot for descriptions that are succinct but still intriguing. Therefore, clarity is important. Anyone coming to look at your description should understand what you're getting at without additional digging. For example, unless you have established senior staff characters/tagged characters, don't assume the audience knows who a referenced person is. If you're describing later works in a tale series/canon or a work that's referencing other ones, make sure that your description works independently of whether or not anyone has read the first few/other tales. Some examples of good descriptions:
Treats
SCP-106 goes on a Halloween rampage. What happens when an innocent town is caught in its path?
This description for Treats accurately summarizes the events of the plot (being that SCP-106 is let loose on a Halloween town by accident), while not revealing so much of the plot that there are spoilers.
Clef v Kondraki
Clef is prepared to kill one of the Foundation's most dangerous SCP objects. But is he prepared to fight Kondraki and the rest of Site-17 to do so?
An actual example from our existing descriptions! Again, a great description of the plotline, and a teaser that keeps the audience's interest piqued.
Exit Strategy
After SCP-217 spores are inadvertently released over South America, the world goes to hell.
Again, an actual example. Another accurate description of the plot, but simple enough that I want to read more about this tale to see how it all went to hell.
Her Masterpiece
Sometimes art takes immense amounts of sacrifice. Sometimes, the sacrifice doesn't need to be your own.
This one sets up the premise for the tale by simply providing an ominous statement, relevant to the tale's plot.
Not every description needs to be perfect, since we have many, many works to get through, but try to keep these things in mind as you're working through the collections. The important thing at the end of the day is, make sure that your description works standalone for attention grabbing. If you have any questions, feel free to ask 
weizhong or 
Lazar Lyusternik.
Per 
