Sorry, I think I have to take back my uncalled-for proposal. I have seen the thrend for new members of the site to introduce themselves in the General Discussion.

For reference, the Unsplash License states that images can be downloaded and used for commercial and non-commercial purposes. Permission from the photographer or attributing it to them is not necessary. It's a license without many restrictions, but it's not Creative Commons and you can't sell photos without significant modification.¹ That last is probably why Unsplash has gotten a lot of professional photographers to publish their work under what is basically a free license. If you browse through their website, the photos there are much higher quality than what you can find on Flickr (especially with it getting filled up with AI slop) and better than a lot of what's on Wikimedia Commons, too, at least in my experience.

I'm not suggesting we change the license the work we make is published under, but it's possible to put elements of a work under different licenses. The site should be fine allowing pieces where the writing is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 but an image on the page is under the Unsplash license. The government talks about different parts of a work being owned by different people here (see 503.4); the same principles should apply. Legally, we should be in the clear. A work can create elements under multiple copyrights, and so long as we're not putting elements covered by CC in the photos, we should be able to have them in a work alongside Creative Commons text.

I am given to understand that in the past the SCP Wiki had allowed non-CC images to be used with permission, but had problems with people making derivatives. Given the scope of the site, I think this is less of a problem for us; Unsplash photos are also usually not recognizable figures like 173, the dragon snails, or the eye pods. In addition, making derivatives is permitted by the terms of the Unsplash license. And while the content of the site is under CC BY-SA 3.0 unless otherwise stated, people usually source images on the talk page; that's "otherwise noted."

However, I would suggest either requiring Unsplash photos to be used as is (the straightforward solution)² or for Creative Commons material to be kept out of any photo edits (more complicated, but I think most photomanipulations don't integrate CC material into the work). I would also suggest adding a splash page, like how the SCP wiki requires for certain works that are more adult in nature, disclaiming that some of the photos on the page are under the Unsplash license.

Current thinking by staff is that, given the opportunity cost of losing attention/readership we might be able to gain from promoting our contest to SCP users as a major event, it may be desirable to delay the contest itself while opening up a "bare-bones" wing three. This would have blank .00 slots and lack the full "theming" that wings one and two have, though we would likely post some in-universe flavor to point to its current status. Posting would continue as normal, filling up the .1, .2, .3 slots for the next two months while the 9k contest plays out, and then, possibly after a bit of time to let writers recover/re-energize, we would announce our wing three contest.

This, to me, seems more desirable than the friction of 2 simultaneous "definitive" contests happening on the site, and though I think it will be a bit awkard in the short term, there are ways to alleviate that, and that this would be much better for the growth and health of the site in the long run, allowing us to try to better take advantage of an opportunity to increase our readership and bring new blood to the site, especially after a time where we've, in some ways, taken steps back in the past month or two.

However, this is a significant enough decision that staff would not want to do it unilaterally. We would like to hear user feedback on this, especially concerns and questions, and if there are other ideas or proposals people have about how this situation might be dealt with.

Both the SCP website and The Wanderers Library had a rainbow/LGBTQ pattern over it during the month of july. The SCP website has their logo back to normal now. I like it that way, stylistically. I have noticed that the wanderers library logo has not been updated/turned back to normal. Can we change it back to the regular gold version?

i'm not good at wikidot coding so i don't know how possible this is, but as the wanderer's library is more focused around collecting stories, shouldn't each article on the index have like a little blurb explaining what they are somehow? a short passage from the text, or a hand-written summary or fake review made by the author themselves? to me that would aid greatly in finding new and interesting stories to read.

anyways, i know this isn't the foundation, and as someone who's only used the foundation for the past 4 years and is a newcomer to this site, it may just be that it's been hard to adjust. but i feel this site could really benefit from some ease of navigation so that all the different things people put hard work into writing can actually be found and enjoyed.

oh! maybe you could have some kind of tag search or like label each tale with a genre or something and set up a whole kind of dewey-decimal-esque library system so you can search for books on a specific subject? that would be pretty neat.

thank you in advance to anyone who considers these suggestions

I post that to talk with you about my project.

My project is a total translation of this wiki and i want you support. The start is just here so if you want admin access to the translate, join them and PM me !

And if you want officialize my project, is very cool thanks !

1: Make the five most recently created articles visible on the homepage, with links. This'll give the newest articles a chance to be properly critiqued, edited, and deleted as necessary.

2: Perhaps the wanderer's library should have some sort of basic canon, like the SCP Foundation. What I mean is a series of set values that are almost fully inflexible, but still a lot of room with what you can do with it. The SCP site has done this extraordinarily well, given the over 3000 total scp articles.

3: Perhaps a reachout is in order. Perhaps the Wanderer's library should have a contest involving the SCP Site, perhaps one site has to link to the other somehow, idk, that's up to the mods to decide.

4: Finally, maybe instead of making shelves based on unusual names, perhaps they should be based on subject, or time period.

I already have some ideas for the next prompt if any staff are interested.

Thoughts?

The SCP wiki has a little avatar/karma display next to the account widget. I personally find it pretty convenient.

The Library doesn't have this. I'd appreciate it if it were included at some point; it would make the place that much more modern.

I read about the various proposals for a Wanderer's Library RPG, whether through chat or forum, and remembered an old project I tried to start awhile back with some friends.

To put it simply, I tried to combine aspects of the tabletop RPGs Call of Cthulhu and Mage: The Awakening, and had all of the mathematical gubbins figured out, but everyone who wanted to play dropped out of the project.

The combined system is interesting as it used the simple and in-depth skill system of Call of Cthulhu and combined it with the improvised spell-casting that was possible within Mage: The Awakening. Although I did not plan it to, it very much could be the perfect system for a Wanderer's Libary themed setting.

Anyways, thoughts?

I don't have the original file but I think I could put everything back together pretty quickly. If there is any interest, I could get everything ready in roughly a month.