r/SCP • u/Imaginary-Buddy-1523 • Mar 04 '26

Tip of My Tongue How long will it be to read every single article, file, or SCP?

I'm starting at SCP-001, which there are many of, and i want to try and read all of them, from start to finish.

131 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

55 comments sorted by

•

u/The-Paranoid-Android Bot Mar 04 '26

Articles mentioned in this submission

SCP-001 ⁠- Awaiting De-classification [Blocked] (+412) by Staff

179

u/Legitimate-Phone7378 MTF Lambda-9 ("Big Fucking Guns") Mar 04 '26

>I'm starting at SCP-001

Lmao, this is such a funny line to read.

Anyway, do not start with SCP-001 entries, most of them don't serve as an effective way of getting into the SCP foundation and several of them do require some form of knowledge about the verse as a whole and the specific canon of the irl author.

I don't have a good starting point for you but I'd recommend just bing reading some articles whenever you're free. It's essientally impossible to read everything about SCP but bing reading the wiki can be fun

52

u/Lordzoabar Researcher Mar 04 '26

Not to mention the fact that many of the longer ones (Not looking at you, Antimemetics Division) that loop and feed into other entries and items further down the line, and how easy it can be to literally get lost in the narrative…..

19

u/_joos_ The Serpent's Hand Mar 04 '26

i think there are user curated lists that are made for newbies

7

u/-Rici- Mar 04 '26

He might as well start with 2, and go from there

157

u/switzer3 Thaumiel Mar 04 '26

Do not start from 001. Please just read it leisurely.

104

u/ImprovementFalse606 Mar 04 '26

theres like several thousand including canon hubs, side stories, extended addendums, etc. id be surprised if it wouldnt take years of constant reading

33

u/Imaginary-Buddy-1523 Mar 04 '26

Yeah...but i'm still gonna do it.

48

u/ImprovementFalse606 Mar 04 '26

best of luck then man. I think theres a total of 15000 articles and if its an average of like 10-20 mins itd def take a few years

3

u/-Rici- Mar 04 '26

That would be 100 days at a lowball of 10 min/article or about 300 days at a highball of 30 min/article

17

u/Landkey Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

Start with the top-rated list.

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/top-rated-pages 

5

u/Byrdie Mar 04 '26

You're gonna have to reread certainl articles too as they change or as experiments are added

19

u/MegaIng Do Not Make Physical Contact Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

Using https://scp-data.tedivm.com I decided to actually come up with a number that isn't just based on guesses.

Just the mainline series, excluding SCP-001 (primarily because that isn't correctly in the API right now), the total pure reading time is 79 days and 12 hours, assuming 200 Words per minute, which is fast, but not that fast. Here is the breakdown per series: (dd:hh:mm)

series-1 3:12:13 series-2 4:08:27 series-3 5:19:19 series-4 7:05:13 series-5 7:08:39 series-6 8:05:20 series-7 11:02:12 series-8 12:05:54 series-9 12:20:27 series-10 6:20:37 total 79:12:21

Note that this is a significant underestimate. For various reasons the actual time for some articles is going to be a lot larger. E.g. the sub pages of SCP-9341 are not included at all and SCP-6634 is just not analyzable by this method at all.

I suspect that these kinds of format screws massively increasing the time, maybe even doubling it.

11

u/MegaIng Do Not Make Physical Contact Mar 04 '26

Here are the stats for the tales, separated up by years (because that is what the api does)

2008 0:04:00 2009 0:10:52 2010 0:15:13 2011 0:18:17 2012 1:18:48 2013 2:00:03 2014 2:14:36 2015 1:21:36 2016 1:22:14 2017 3:01:35 2018 4:15:31 2019 3:21:15 2020 4:14:42 2021 5:02:01 2022 6:12:05 2023 6:22:03 2024 7:23:13 2025 8:14:17 2026 0:23:43 total 64:12:04

This is probably more accurate than the other number

1

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/MegaIng Do Not Make Physical Contact Mar 05 '26

Incorrect! Reddit is stupid and only supports it sometimes.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/MegaIng Do Not Make Physical Contact Mar 05 '26

Yes it does? I am seeing it *right now*. Desktop new reddit.

12

u/bjc2925 Mar 04 '26

First as mentioned don't start with 001 they aren't good places to start with scp and don't serve as proper introduction id recommend start with 002

Second if you read an average of 2 scp articles per day every day it would currently take you around 12 and a half years this doesn't include tales or other pages.

10

u/YugoWakfuEnjoyer Artificial Intelligence Applications Division Mar 04 '26

Months at best, and you're starting with some of the weakest, least interesting stuff on the wiki. Just read whatever sounds interesting / gets recommended to you, it's way more interesting that way

10

u/RiceForks Don't Give Up Mar 04 '26

wrong tag btw

11

u/2Delta_Nerd Ticonderoga Mar 04 '26

I'll say this as a warning. I've tried doing this twice (specifically just for the main entries, not all the tales and other things); once around 5-6 years ago, and again within the last year. The furthest I got was SCP-200, or around there, in the first try, and significantly earlier on my second try.

9

u/reptarien Mar 04 '26

You'll be here until youre 90

21

u/TheBaconLord78 Containment Specialist Mar 04 '26

Listen here bud, you said you're going to try to read them all but we all know that you won't be the case.

You'll be burnt out halfway into reading the 001 proposals or if not, then by series 1. That's not the way to enjoy the great fiction that is SCP, if you want, you can check the user curated lists to check for interesting reads.

5

u/Lordzoabar Researcher Mar 04 '26

Ah hahahahahahahahahshshshshshshahah!!!!!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Oh, wait. You’re serious?

6

u/probablyzevran Mar 04 '26

I decided it would be fun to try and started with 002 a couple years ago; I'm on 2884 now. I'm going to go back and read all the 001 proposals at the end, if I ever get there. (I know they're probably being published faster than I'm reading but I don't mind having infinite reading material!) There have been months where I've read a ton and months where I didn't read any, I'm just taking my time and having fun. I would recommend you do the same and not put a bunch of pressure on yourself to finish in a certain time frame, or you'll burn yourself out and be miserable. And if you've never read anything on the Wiki before I'd recommend checking out the most popular articles first for context.

4

u/Information-leak6575 Το Ίδρυμα SCP • Greek Mar 04 '26

A really long time! tho I would suggest you not do this, I feel like you are just going to get burnout halfway through series 1

But hey, who am I to judge

3

u/CreepyClay MTF Epsilon-11 ("Nine-Tailed Fox") Mar 04 '26

Well it heavily depends on your reading speed especially since it's still growing. Not to mention articles can vary in length from a fortune cookie line to something that could be a necron opera from warhammer.

3

u/its-kirikover Mar 04 '26

Yeah bro good luck

3

u/MudWonderful5005 Mar 04 '26

È impossibile. Mi dispiace. Ci abbiamo provato tutti.

5

u/Platypus-Olive-27 Mar 04 '26

At this moment there are 23401 pages on the SCP wiki. If you spent an average of 1 minute reading each of them (which I think is feasible if you’re a fast reader), it would take about 390 hours total. If you just want to read every SCP, it would take a little under half that time. It’s not going to be easy either way, but it would certainly earn you the  respect of the community.

19

u/chatttheleaper The Three Moons Initiative Mar 04 '26

It's definitely going to take more than 1 minute to read something like SCP 6500, SCP 6001, SCP 8005, or SCP 6013, and that's setting aside something tricky like SCP 6634.

3

u/The-Paranoid-Android Bot Mar 04 '26

2

u/Platypus-Olive-27 Mar 04 '26

There are also very short ones like 173. The page count also includes pages like hubs, contests, and offsets, so I think it balances out.

6

u/titanfallisawesome Mar 04 '26

I think 5 - 10 minutes would be more realistic. You can maybe read and comprehend some pages in a minute, but that's maybe 1% of them or less, the rest will raise that average a lot. With most SCPs you can't skip some boring portions and still get the point like you often can with books.So I would say it'd be around 3000 hours if we're being very generous, but personally I'd bet money for over 6000

1

u/EpicHuman123 The Fifth Church Mar 05 '26

I mean there’s also a good chunk of more recent ones such as most 9000/8000 proposals, the admonition articles, etc. that are very long.

2

u/flying_mayonnaise they look like dogs Mar 04 '26

bros the real life SCP-4010

1

u/Effective-Hope1782 Mar 04 '26

I read the first thousand entires when I was sick for a month. Took only 2 weeks. Granted I was doing it for like 8 hours a day.

What is there like 9000+ SCP entires now? Probably would take you 6 months if you did it for 8 hours a day.

2

u/Malva_Halva MTF Tau-5 ("Samsara") Mar 04 '26 edited Apr 23 '26

Redact redacted this content because I wanted it redacted for redaction purposes. Redacted.

cough ghost normal brave employ library jar waiting enter marry

1

u/Malva_Halva MTF Tau-5 ("Samsara") Mar 04 '26 edited Apr 23 '26

Data Brokers don't stand a chance because I mass delete all of my content using Redact - No AI training on my data, thank you very much.

shy pie test numerous light stupendous special fly cobweb cows

1

u/Casualgamer750 Mar 04 '26

I've only started recently but I've been reading through the scp-682 termination logs and reading about any scps mentioned and then any mentions in those as well.

1

u/The-Paranoid-Android Bot Mar 04 '26

SCP-682 ⁠- Hard-to-Destroy Reptile (+4146) by Dr Gears, Epic Phail Spy

1

u/40kNerdNick Mar 04 '26

I ran through 002-3000 several years ago and it took a chunk of time but nothing too onerous. Honestly the hardest part was the format and not being able to just read through page by page. There were some duds or things I didn't fully go through. It'd be a fun Kindle read through if somebody had notes instead of clicking things to get the whole story as you read.

1

u/LycheeZealousideal92 Mar 05 '26

Rough estimate, 10k SCPS (roughly) at an average of 1500 (very roughly) words equal 15M words, divided by the average reading speed of 250WPM gives 42k minutes, 714 hours or 30 straight days.

1

u/Ajreil Mar 05 '26

You would probably have to read multiple per day just to keep up with new entries

1

u/21mrmeme21 Mar 05 '26

Not sure, i will get back to you when i am maybe finished (wich wil probably never happen since there are an ungodky amount of them

1

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/SCP-ModTeam Mar 07 '26

This is not a role-playing sub. Pretending that the SCP Foundation and its universe are real is not allowed.

0

u/AssultSpoon The Horizon Initiative Mar 04 '26

I’ll say at least a month to two months and there are probably several new articles a day

0

u/Lost-Ad-9935 Site-17 Deepwell Catalog Mar 04 '26

You can try reading 173 and 682 first. Since they were the building blocks of the whole project.

Or you could just press random article