Branch SCP History

Well, I may miss some points in our history and forget others, but here’s how I remember it. – GeneR

For all I know, it all started in the image boards. On June 27th, 2010, the user known as SCP-RU and some other guys decided to try translating the SCP Foundation into Russian. Ged_Malburg is the oldest active member from those days. Back then there was a different design, no nav:side menu and no forums – work on translation was coordinated using a separate webpage. Registration was open to anyone, without restriction. GeneR joined the project in the end of November 2010. At that time it was pretty much abandoned – only three people were displaying any activity. So they trucked along, doing things on their own, until the user dr-phasanova proposed that she, Malburg and GeneR should work together.

I still have that proposal message, it was sent on 30th January 2011. We had about 110 complete translations at that time – GeneR

SCP-RU, the guy who started it, had long since left the project. No one but him was an administrator, so the staff were really limited in what they could change, similar to how The Administrator being MIA limited the English SCP Wiki in 2009. Fortunately, Malburg managed to contact him and get administrator privileges for the three in February 2011. At that time, they finally had forums, voting modules and a design like the English wiki. That was also the time Resure joined. He filled the “tech” niche quite nicely and provided priceless help with various web features, Google Analytics, domain name registration and other stuff none of the others were competent with.

Sometime in March 2011 they decided to try creating their own SCPs and created a sandbox site. Rules were changed frequently throughout its history, at one time running one’s SCP through the sandbox was not necessary for authors with >5 approved SCPs on the main site. SCPs from that time have a distinct vibe to them, but now are generally regarded the same as English SCPs from 2008. Pretty much “the classics”.

We even have plans to rewrite them, but rewrites are almost unheard of in our community, so that’s new horizons for us. – GeneR

When the site was a year old, they decided to have a meet-up. Only 3 people came, but that was a start. There were at least 7 other meetups since then with two of these gathering 11 site members.

Dugond and Osobist came some time after. Dugond had a tremendous working capacity – most of their mass edits were primarily his effort. He saw a lot of minor blemishes and inconsistencies, and contributed much to the site’s improvement. Eventually, however, they made the mistake of letting him maintain the sandbox wiki alone, and he burned out. Since he also had to work on his thesis, he left. Eventually he came back, had another period of activity, and left for another hiatus. But that’s really condensing 2 years into a paragraph. Dugond is gone right now.

I do not have any means of contacting him, he’ll come out eventually. Or maybe he won’t. – GeneR

Osobist is still active. He does many of the “official” and “organizational” tasks, manages the vk.com (Russian Facebook analogue) community and maintains general order.

Both of them were active translators (Dugond was more prolific, though). People kept joining and the amount of content grew. Amassing content was a priority at that time, so the number of translations (and new -RU SCPs) increased steadily.

Ah. Back to 2011. At the end of the year GeneR first translated one of their articles into English (SCP-1138). It was originally written by Fartun and was his debut SCP. Secondly, he managed to transfer the master administrator rights from SCP-RU (whom he tried to contact several times with no results). After a year and a half of work they finally got rid of female underwear ads below SCP-076. They were kinda killing the mood.

In September 2011 they had their first case of vandalism, so they developed a membership application procedure modeled after the English SCP Wiki’s procedure. At the end of November, a user named Wiiskey violated the rules and posted http://scpfoundation.ru/evil-doctor-alto-klef directly to the main site. The poem quickly rose to the top 3 and is still there, on par with 173 and slightly above 076.

2012 changed much. First and foremost, SCP-087 game came into existence. The amount of visitors in Google Analytics increased five-fold, the amount of new applicants and bad SCPs in the sandbox… you get the idea.

In April 2012 they had to ban one of their most prolific authors (with ~25 SCPs written) over a disagreement about the GOI he invented. He did not take well to criticism. It was a long and unpleasant story, and they try not to talk about it. The social network group was also established in early 2012. The Russian wiki has continued to grow, with thousands of articles either translated or created originally. They also had their own translation contest in 2013, and had over 177 entries submitted for it.

The Russian SCP Wiki was the first translation community, and it has continued to grow in the years we’ve been working with it. They’ve had some hard times, just like us, but they’ve always come out stronger for it. If you ever have the inclination, read over some of their original tales and articles. Maybe say hi to their staff. Appreciate the work they’ve done for us, in the past, and into the future.

Korean Branch

It all started with the games. When Containment Breach and SCP-087-B came out in May of 2012, they were massively popular in Korea, to the same level that it was in the United States, Russia, and elsewhere. People all over the country were playing the game, talking about it, and looking into its origin.

As the SCP Foundation erupted in Korea, and as the community continued gaining people, the main point of interest was not the game, but the SCP articles themselves. So on May 2012, a Korean translation site was hosted on the Korean Rigveda wiki. SCP-KR began translation on a massive and rapid scale.

The Founder of SCP Korea HQ was originally Merlin Emrys, and co-founder scpfskhq. This site was able to gain some very skilled translators from the beginning. Shfoakdls, Devanos and QAZ135 were the three original translators, with the occasional addition of a user named Daniel. Major SCPs were translated, such as the big four of SCP-173, 682, 087, 096, and many, many more.

There was one major rival with this Korean site, a user named Dr. Kim. As the SCP Korea HQ grew, Dr Kim established his blog, SCP-ROK, and began creating his own SCP translations. He contacted SCP Korea HQ staff asking to use some of their translations to include in ROK. Because of license problems, they had to consult with other users on the issue, and did not answer him immediately. Instead, they promised to answer when they were able to make a final decision. While the voting and discussion about this was going on, Dr Kim established his new site in kind of a private wiki form and started gathering users.

SCP Korea HQ staff were very surprised by this development, but didn’t want to enlarge the problem and allowed Kim to do this. After a month, Dr Kim went to the SCP English Wiki, and attempted to officially confirm that his blog was the official Korean translation site of the foundation. If one looks at the main page history, his wiki was the first to be added. Note that initially, Dr Kim simply added himself to the page without consulting SCP English site administration.

Shfoakdls and Devanos of SCP Korea HQ contacted him about this, and he claimed that the SCP English site was debating about putting his blog in the main page. As part of the discussion, Dr Kim proposed a possibility of doing sort of a symbiosis with SCP Korea HQ. At this point HQ staff researched about the news, saw the message from Dr Kim on the O5 Command, and were enraged. So, they stopped talks with Dr. Kim, and founded the WikiDot Korean wiki.

There were over 250 translations at that time, so they had to make a wiki, move people, and move translations. Previously to this, QAZ135 had been planning to make a move to WikiDot, but the project was boosted by the drama with Dr Kim. Following this, and several communications with the English SCP Wiki, The SCP Korean wiki established by shfoakdls, QAZ135 and Devanos, was unanimously concluded as official Korean wiki. This wiki is the one known as SCP-KR.

This all happened between 2012 may to 2012 october. – shfoakdls

After all the drama was wrapped up, Devanos announced that Korean wiki is officially hostile to Dr Kim’s blog. In turn, Dr Kim announced that he would apologize, and asked for the facts that he should apologize for. So the two sets of staff had continuous arguments over this issue, and over the issue of legitimacy. It was consuming too much of the staff’s time, so shfoakdls and QAZ135 put a stop to it. They stopped all official policy against Dr Kim and SCP-ROK.

After that, except for several conflicts between Devanos and Dr Kim, SCP-KR was able to focus on translating articles and moving content from SCP Korea HQ onto the WikiDot site. They had most translation in Korea, Most foundation tale translation, and users were constantly coming in. Devanos wanted SCP Korean wiki end its relationship with original SCP Korea HQ. Other staff disagreed. They argued that it would be just a lousy thing to do, since Founder of SCP Korea HQ had allowed them continue the wiki project, knowing that all the users and translation would move to Korean wiki.

It wasn’t a really great thing for them. – shfoakdls

The admin Devanos was upset about the fact that shfoakdls and QAZ135 did not want to cut off ties to SCP Korea HQ. So after a long conversation, he decided to give up his admin position and remain as a user. This incident occured on 2012/11/28. After Devanos gave up his position, only two active admins were left.1

Then, on 2013/01/16, SCP-KR’s mother site, SCP Korea HQ site disappeared.

All the staff and users were blocked, articles were erased, and the site was essentially erased and destroyed. SCP-KR users simply assumed a hacker did it, in order to destroy the large site and make a small site for people who liked the HQ and wanted to use it instead of SCP-KR. Unfortunately, the loss of this site also meant the loss of the excellent translation work done by user Daniel, who had declined to have his work moved to SCP-KR. There were many guesses on what happened with the site, such as this theory:

The user who was involved in the situation confessed that it was the Merlin Emrys, the founder of HQ who did it.

He told that Merlin Emrys was fed up with all these SCP Foundation and thought it was a great idea to pretend he was hacked and delete everything. (This is what happens when a major admin decides to delete the whole site on his own. Beware, Roget.) – shfoakdls

There is only this anonymous users word to go on for this theory. So it cannot be said that it’s definitely true, but that was the most detailed answer put forth by any party.

With this incident, SCP-KR announced that it was completely separate and irrelevant from the smaller SCP Korea HQ site. After that, everything just went normal, to this day. Since then, they’ve translated Containment Breach into Korean, gotten up to date with the Creative Commons License, and made a chatroom.

On January 6th, 2014, the SCP-KR folks changed their ISO, to SCP-KO. This was done after receiving the help of SophosBlitz, who was contacted through the help of the SCP moderator Roget.

Shfoakdls requested that I end the essay on this note, as he feels it is advice which is relevant not only to the SCP-KR wiki, but to us and every other community involved with our collective work. Sophos added the SCP-KR domain to his name, which made it much easier to change. And so, from that point, the site was known as SCP-KO.

There was a whole lot drama, but SCP goes on, and we will try for the better.