User blog comment:Bocaj910/The Wiki: A Place For Drama, Or A Place For Stories And Friends?/@comment-1590625-20100915010456/@comment-1874924-20100915045321

Although I've only been here since February, it seems to me that drama, in the sense that Bocaj means, seems to come and go. It's part of the human condition, though, so all we can really do is deal with it when it's here and avoid dwelling on it when it isn't.

That said, I wouldn't put the FA/FU controversy in the same class as the QOS situation. The former involved (usually) reasonable disagreement regarding a wiki policy, and the latter involves a problem user. These are very different situations, and the appropriate responses are likewise going to be very different.

As for the theory that the ages of the active users here contributes to the situation, I think there is something in that. While I don't know the actual age distribution here, my impression is that 13-15 years seems to be the most heavily populated age range. Not only is this a hormone-driven period, as TAU noted, but it's also the period when people really start testing boundaries.

According to my father (a longtime public schoolteacher, as I have noted elsewhere), 8th grade is the worst. When my siblings and I (especially the brother closest in age to me) were that age and said something snotty or uppity, my dad's favorite dismissive retort was, "Typical 8th grade remark." He once suggested that school districts should just send 8th graders home for a year, as some European countries did at the time (and maybe still do) because 8th graders don't fit naturally with anyone else. 7th graders, he suggested, really belong with the elementary school kids, and 9th graders belong with the high school kids.