User blog:Sam1207/Response to Walker2000's Wiki Rights Post

Hello readers, I've not written a Community Central blog post before, but I thought I should use my experiences on Wikia to inform other users of an issue which is happening all the time across, probably, all Wikis.

Walker2000 recently posted a blog post about being under 13 and using Wikia. The truth is, the Staff and administrators have no idea of the real genuine ages of people editing.

So the reason I have decided to write this blog post is to inform readers of the unbelievable number of people, who, despite editing on Wikia, are under the legal age. They are breaking laws, but because any age can be entered in account creation, Wikia mostlty relies on honesty for new users to sign up and edit.

I guess what I'm trying to do is explain to Wikia staff to the number of people who clearly shouldn't be editing. According to various sources, the average age of a Wiki vandal is 11-14. That means that half of these people should not even be on the Wiki at all.

I have edited on Wikis where users are clearly under the age, as they seem to be deliberately misspelling, not using correct punctuation or even vandalising. I know this based on the fact that people who are serious about editing a Wiki make sure they do it properly, and not fake their age on the account creator.

But are administrators or sysops doing enough to find out weather they are breaking laws? The Wikis, which will remain unnamed, which I edited on seemed to simply ignore the errors or even ignore the vandalism.

Again, this is not a statement intended to cause anger or offense to any user, simply to inform the admins of some Wikis to be careful about Users who are breaking the laws of the Privacy Protection Act.

I am saying this as the administrator of four Wikis and a long time Wikia and Wikipedia editor, which both take this matter extremely seriously.

Please comment if you would like to share experiences on your own Wikis.