The only franchise here that tells you the number is not a ranking
Everywhere else here, the case has to be built from scratch. Bounties price threat to
a government, databooks stop being printed, a tattoo turns out to be an office.
In each case the reader has to be shown that the published figure measures
something other than power, because the franchise never says so.
The Foundation says so, in its own documentation, before anybody asks. A Keter
designation is stated not to imply danger — only that keeping hold of the thing
is difficult or expensive. And the deciding heuristic is disarmingly small: shut
it in something and watch. Still there, Safe. Nobody sure, Euclid. Gone, Keter.
That is a containment budget. It is a good one, it is honestly labelled, and it
is read as a threat ladder by almost everybody who encounters it — including, in
practice, by people who have read the definition.
So this page is the shortest argument on the site. Two entries do the work.
SCP-914 turns objects into other objects and is filed Safe, correctly,
because until somebody reaches for the dial it is furniture.
SCP-999 is a friendly slime and is also filed Safe. The bracket that
contains both is not ranking anything.
What shown means when the primary source is a report
The confidence marks work slightly differently here, and the difference is worth
stating because it is the first time this site has had a franchise made of
documents rather than of scenes.
An SCP article’s Description is the Foundation asserting what a thing is.
That is stated — an in-universe authority making a claim, which is precisely
the category this site treats with suspicion everywhere else.
An article’s test logs, addenda and incident reports record events that
occurred. That is shown — the closest thing this format has to a depicted
scene, and it is why SCP-682 and SCP-914 carry the strongest evidence on the
page. Both have been experimented on, repeatedly, by an organisation that
writes down its failures.
Most entries here rest on Description alone, and that is marked rather than
hidden. It is also why this ranking is deliberately short. There are thousands
of articles; there are far fewer whose documents record a tested result, and
this page would rather have eight entries that cite a log than forty that cite
a summary.
Attribution
Content relating to the SCP Foundation is licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, and all
concepts referenced on this page originate from
scpwiki.com and its authors. Every entry above links
to the specific article it draws on.
This page, being derived from that content, is hereby also released under
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Copy it, quote it, repost it,
sell it if you like — credit the SCP authors and keep it equally open for the
next person. The anomalies are not ours and the ranking is only an argument
about somebody else’s inventions, so there is nothing here worth fencing off.