---
type: source
title: "SCP Foundation: Governance Architecture and Collaborative Worldbuilding at Scale"
author: "SCP Wiki Community (scp-wiki.wikidot.com)"
url: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/guide-hub
date: 2025-11-01
domain: entertainment
secondary_domains: [ai-alignment]
format: article
status: unprocessed
priority: high
tags: [SCP-Foundation, collaborative-fiction, governance, worldbuilding, narrative-protocol, quality-control, community-authorship, CC-BY-SA]
flagged_for_theseus: ["SCP Foundation's 18-year protocol-based governance without central authority is a collective intelligence case study — standardized interfaces enabling distributed coordination"]
---

## Content

Synthesized from multiple SCP Foundation official sources: Guide Hub (scp-wiki.wikidot.com/guide-hub), Wikipedia summary, and community documentation.

**Scale and history:**
- Founded: 2008 (18 years as of 2026)
- Articles: 9,800+ SCP objects as of late 2025 + 6,300+ Tales
- Language branches: 16 total (English original + 15 others)
- License: CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike)
- Status: Potentially the largest collaborative writing project in human history (American Journalism Review, 2022)

**Governance architecture:**

Four-layer quality system:
1. **Greenlight Policy (pre-publication):** New authors must pitch concept to Ideas Critique Forum and receive greenlight from 2 experienced reviewers before drafting. Reviewers need 3+ successful articles or roster membership to be greenlighters.
2. **Post-publication community voting:** Articles are rated by community votes. -10 threshold triggers deletion review process. -20 enables immediate deletion.
3. **Staff deletion authority:** 3 staff votes + 24-hour timer = deletion. Emergency bypass for plagiarism, AI-generated content, malicious material = summary deletion + permanent ban.
4. **Cultural norms:** "Clinical tone" convention, standardized formatting, the SCP containment report format as a recognizable genre.

**Staff role clarification (critical):**
Staff handle INFRASTRUCTURE — discipline, licensing, moderation, technical — NOT creative direction. There is no creative gatekeeper. The entire creative direction emerges from community voting and cultural norms.

**Canon model:**
"There is no official canon." The SCP universe operates as "a conglomerate of intersecting canons, each with its own internal coherence." Contributors create "canons" — clusters with shared locations/characters/plots. Hub pages describe each canon's scope. The organization deliberately chose not to establish canonical hierarchy, enabling infinite expansion without continuity errors.

**AI policy:**
Permanent ban on AI-generated content. Summary deletion + permanent ban for authors who submit AI content.

**The "narrative protocol" framework:**
Success factors identified by community analysts:
1. Fixed format (standardized academic/bureaucratic tone + containment report structure)
2. Open IP (CC-BY-SA enables any adaptation)
3. Scalable contributions (single article = complete contribution, no arc commitment)
4. Passive theme (paranormal anomalies = everyday life provides infinite prompts)
5. Thin curation (quality gates without creative gatekeeping)
6. Organizational center (prevents fragmentation, maintains identity)

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** SCP Foundation is the existence proof for the "distributed authorship produces worldbuilding" finding. 18 years of quality collaborative fiction at massive scale WITHOUT a creative gatekeeper. The mechanism is structural: protocol + voting + cultural norms replaces editorial authority for worldbuilding.

**What surprised me:** The ABSENCE of creative authority is a deliberate design choice, not a limitation. Staff explicitly handle only infrastructure, not creative direction. This is architecturally precise — and it's why the model scales. Central creative authority would be the bottleneck.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Direct comparison data between the Greenlight-era quality vs. pre-Greenlight quality. The Greenlight system was implemented because "drafts failed at the conceptual level" before the quality gate — this implies quality variance, but I couldn't find before/after data.

**KB connections:**
- [[collective brains generate innovation through population size and interconnectedness not individual genius]] — SCP is the strongest entertainment-domain evidence for this claim
- [[isolated populations lose cultural complexity because collective brains require minimum network size to sustain accumulated knowledge]] — inverse evidence: SCP Foundation's multi-language branches prevent isolation
- [[no designed master narrative has achieved organic adoption at civilizational scale suggesting coordination narratives must emerge from shared crisis not deliberate construction]] — SCP is interesting counterevidence: a DESIGNED protocol (the containment report format) achieved massive organic adoption. The "protocol" is not the same as a "master narrative" — this distinction needs to be sharpened

**Extraction hints:**
- Primary claim candidate: "Collaborative fiction exhibits a fundamental tradeoff between editorial distribution and narrative coherence — distributed authorship produces scalable worldbuilding while coherent linear narrative requires concentrated editorial authority"
- Secondary claim candidate: "Narrative protocols (standardized format + community voting + organizational center + open licensing) can replace editorial authority for worldbuilding but not for linear narrative"
- Enrichment target: [[narratives are infrastructure not just communication because they coordinate action at civilizational scale]] — SCP demonstrates decentralized narrative coordination at scale without a central coordinator

**Context:** SCP began in 2007 on 4chan's /x/ (paranormal) board. First SCP article (SCP-173) was written by an anonymous user. The wiki moved to Wikidot in 2008. The community grew from a novelty format into the world's largest collaborative writing project without ever having venture funding, studio backing, or a centralized creative director.

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)

PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[narratives are infrastructure not just communication because they coordinate action at civilizational scale]]
WHY ARCHIVED: SCP is the most important case study for the governance spectrum claim (Session 6). 18 years of protocol-governed collaborative worldbuilding at massive scale — the existence proof that distributed authorship can produce coherent output at scale if the scope is worldbuilding (not linear narrative).
EXTRACTION HINT: Extract the "narrative protocol" framework as a claim — the six structural features (fixed format, open IP, scalable contributions, passive theme, thin curation, organizational center) are a transferable model. Also: the staff/creative authority distinction is critical — infrastructure staff ≠ creative gatekeepers.
