User blog comment:Bocaj910/Nobody Sucks/@comment-1874924-20100518041441

My understanding is that main reason for the age minimum on wikis, social networking sites and so forth is to protect younger children from bad influences--most notably, pedophiles. (For those who don't know the term, a pedophile is an adult who likes to have sex with young children. Yeah, sick.) That's also a major reason why adult users (like me) aren't allowed to solicit personal information from users who are under 18.

Such fears (which, sadly, are not entirely baseless) are why I thought it important to be so upfront about my own age when I joined the wiki. Better to bring it into the open myself than to have you guys find out on your own.

Happily, this openness has worked to my advantage in some ways. I suspect that a big part of why I'm being taken seriously as an FU candidate in only my 3rd full month here, despite my relatively modest edit count, is that my uniqueness makes up for my newness. Being an adult who treats kids as equals may also have something to do with it. In any case, the Wikians here have warmly accepted me from the very beginning.