The WikiDot Question

by Harmony B

Why do the Liminal Archives and RPC Authority still exist? There has been a long-held expectation among observers, detractors, and admirers that both of these communities should be facing imminent collapse. People have been saying “RPC is dead” for almost as long as there has been an RPC Authority to prognosticate on. But in spite of it all both of these splinter communities continue soldiering on and have not shown any sign of surrendering to the forces of entropy. They do have one common unifying element, the continuous attention paid to them by the respective communities they splinter off from. The communities which originated these alt-confic spaces are self-conscious of their existence and their continual embarrassment has lead them to unintentionally keep the brand alive by supplying a steady stream of post-onboarding newbie.

Everyone sharing the WikiDot platform also helps. No matter how much is built on top of the legacy of Sigma-9 there is no escaping that everything is ultimately WikiDot. In the event of a WikiDot collapse the RPC Authority and the Liminal Archives would probably do much, much better than the SCP Wiki. SCP has for more than a decade been trying to migrate off WikiDot and have been unable to come close to accomplishing it. Even if they are able to overcome the technical challenges, the political questions of who would run and operate the website remain unanswered and not even really under consideration. Meanwhile, the much more linear and personality-driven cliques governing RPC and the Liminal Archives would be much more inclined to just jump to whatver platform is available, even non-ideal ones. SCP is much larger, more spread out, and more unwieldlty. The Backrooms Wiki has not reached their scale despite their previous expectations of being the next wave of confic, but their not expanding to that size and their lack of deep political commitment to a self-owned solution to the WikiDot question, means their community will probably be absorbed into the existing Backrooms communities on other Wiki platforms.

The WikiDot Question is as such: What happens after WikiDot goes dark for the last time? The fact that it has persisted even this long is miraculous. It was only a few years ago that the entire platform was being shopped around on cryptocurrency forums. Even if the SCP Staff were able to purchase WikiDot, they would not have the capacity to maintain it. After the guy responsible for spearheading WikiDot’s development died there’s not really been much other than basic maintenance done, at least as far as any outside observers can tell, and the creakiness only becomes more apparent by the day. If SCP declines in popularity or the cost of the servers gets too high, or even if SCP gets too popular again, really any destabilizing black swan event could mean the end of confic as we know it. The only real plan for dealing with this issue is Project Foundation, but enough has been said already on that particular instance of development hell.

The RPC, Liminal Archives, and to a lesser degree the Backrooms/TS communities are more tight-knit, the former two because they generally can only retain the most disagreeable people from other communities. Many a time has a writer banished from SCP confic spaces ended up spinning their wheels in RPC, I am sure the same is true of the Backrooms and Liminal Archives. Even in my own case, I wrote a few articles for them, which I deleted due to their rules defending misgendering me as an expression of speech, which is why I yanked all my writing from there. Liminal Archives let me have a vote to make an editorial committee which passed, but then just didn’t do and so I left due to feeling there was nothing to be accomplished by staying. Having also dabbled in the Chaos Insurgency Wiki, I will mention them only to say they are equally likely to stay together as they are to fall apart. The Wanderers Library will probably just cease to exist when WikiDot goes down, which is a shame because it has more or less all of the best writing in all of confic.

But if SCP atomizes without WikiDot allowing the Senior Staff to clamp down on it so tightly, what role will they take on then? Controlling all of the social media platforms, but not being in control of the actual spaces which writing is happening, is a curious state of affairs to be in during normal times, but when the community has been blown to the seventeen corners of the net there’s a large chance of outside influences creating headwinds in their authority. Like the Papal States being conquered by the Italians, excepting for the parts of those events which are not even slightly comparable. I personally wonder what will happen to the authority of the Senior Staff when WikiDot falls out from underneath their feet. They have a much less predictible path than any of the other confic communities due to existing on a size an order of magnitude larger than anyone else’s.

The existence of Discord as the primary locus for community interaction will probably help them retain authority, but it will all depend on if they can get everyone writing on the same platform. It would be the opportune time for writers looking to branch out and do something different to create their own versions of SCP. There are so many different nodes of authority which could pull in different directions. I feel like so much of the apparatus now is dedicated to policing people that it would not be able to turn around quickly to assign people to necessary roles in transitioning articles over. I think a lot of pressure would be placed on the technical staff to finish the next-generation wiki platform and if they can’t deliver, everyone gets mad and SCP becomes somehow even more stagnant. If they succeed then the political questions will make things difficult when the fault lines in the community start grinding up against one another. I personally hope they figure it out, some day someone might write a good SCP again. I’d like to see that.