Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-961279-20130625033951

Wikia is going to set it on a lot of wikis that attract young kids so that they have to have an account in order to edit. That brings up the question of what an admin on one of those wiki is supposed to do if they find out someone is under 13.

It was discussed in a forum last year that Wikia does not expect local admins to police underage users. The Terms of Use also says you cannot "solicit personal information from any user under the age of 18". So if someone says they're under 18, any further personal questions regarding their identity are out of bounds. I'd say that you also should not ask someone what their age is with the intent of entrapment so you can block them if they're under 13 because that's being malicious.

As stated on that forum, an admin or a user should use the Contact page to tell Wikia if they learn someone is underage. But it also says that the members of a wiki should decide whether to do something like ban the kid from chat. Related to that would be deciding whether or not to issue a block.

But by not blocking the person, which also prevents access to the chat room, wouldn't that be condoning them lying when they created the account? Further, it seems that an admin or a regular user would be required to notify Wikia about the user. Not doing so could be viewed as withholding Terms of Use information from Wikia. Accounts can be closed for ToU violations, so does not notifying Wikia when you find out someone's under 13 make the admin or user culpable?

An admin shouldn't be a killjoy nor waiting to pounce on a user. But answers to the above would help make it clearer what they are responsible for. 