 Hoi hoi, I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to answer a question. Is the SCP Wiki safe for kids? You might be wondering why I didn't even ask such a question. Ah, you sweet summer child. But for those of you tuned into the SCP Wiki, you might even be asking, oh god, which person got banned now? And a ban did happen, it did sort of inspire this, but that's not the real point of this. Let's look at some data. The SCP Wiki runs a yearly survey, and one of the questions on there is related to age. Now, putting aside from the stupendous problems with asking kids for their ages, in the age of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act, and ultimately hoping that volunteers with no legal degree are getting all the requirements of that right, we do have hard data from 2022 that we can examine to understand the site's demographics a little bit better. This is the survey results. It should be noted, by the way, that joining the site itself requires you to be 18. This survey includes results from people who are not registered with the Wiki, but just read articles. Now, as you can see, 4.86% claimed to be under the age of 13, which is actually a stupendously high number of people, because I'm sure there are more that just either didn't interact with the survey or didn't answer honestly. 29.5% claimed to be between 14 and 16, and 20.68 claimed to be between 17 and 18. Now, it's a little hard to get an exact determination of how many are under the age of 18, since 17 and 18 are included together, but 55% of the respondents claim to be of high school age or younger, and I guarantee you that the number is actually higher, because, again, in order to register for the site, you have to be 18, and the people who register for the site are more likely to answer this survey. Now, is this whole thing of, say, 55%? Just pretend like that number isn't lower than it should be. Is 55% of the people on the Wiki being high school age or younger a problem? Yes. And no, I guess. The problem arises from the fact that the site's average age is below 18, but the content creators and staff are all above 18, because of the rule of registration I mentioned before. It's likely that some staff and creators are just lying about their age too, but that's not really a point here. The problem isn't the kids, see, it's the adults. There have been many scandals throughout the years involving sexual misconduct relating to staff and users on the SCP Wiki. Bright is one of the most recent ones, and most of you have probably seen my video on Bright's misconduct already. Rest assured, though, this is not the only person who was involved with this kind of behavior, and I will say I've known several of these folks personally, as they were other high-profile users, and as each one of them turned out to be a creep, I had to ask myself, why I never saw it coming? You feel like that's the kind of thing you would inherently know about someone, but I didn't for quite a lot of these people. Part of that's probably just aloofness on my part. I don't get to know anybody very well, but I can't help but think I screwed up and missed something from time to time, or excused something that I shouldn't have. Honestly, though, even if these folk kept their creepy shit just contained to adults, it would still be troubling, because they're users on a site where the average age is below 18. I've had this conversation with people on Discord before, and it always comes down to this. There are certainly valid avenues for adult content, should you want to write that, but there's nothing saying you have a natural right to post it to the wiki, and if you do so knowing that about half the people who read it will be below the age of 18, then you've made a decision. We can talk about the appropriateness of that decision, but you can't pretend that you didn't exercise free will on the subject. It's not just the content on the site, by the way, but also behaviors of people, but the content is reflective of the acceptance of people to put adult content or adult behaviors in front of children. One way a lot of authors relieve themselves with the burden of responsibility here is to throw an adult splash page up on their work. It's a little sort of like entry landing page that warns the user that the work is for adults only. It forces them to click to confirm before they read it, but this just circles back to making a choice. You know that kids will read this. So why are you leaving it in a place that kids can pick it up? I mean, it's an inexact metaphor, which absolutely wouldn't leave a book containing adult content on a park bench just because it has a clear warning label on the cover. So why are you putting it on the internet in a place where half the audience are kids? But of course, there's another hitch here, too. It's hard to argue to someone that they should write what they know to an author when those authors are mostly young adults and teenagers themselves and then to admonish them after they do so because they wrote smut. This is the stuff that's occupying their minds a lot of the time. But I think just don't post it here would be a pretty good way to go about it. But we, and what we I mean, those of us who are adults and not just young adults, but like older adults. I'm 37, 38. I'm so old, I don't remember how old I am. Have an additional responsibility to keep an eye out for creepy behavior. I'd argue that you shouldn't be engaging in any adult behaviors with folk you know online, but they also know arguing that would be a lost cause. Just keep it nontransactional. Keep consent in mind to be goddamn sure kids aren't seeing this stuff is going on. Remember that behaviors you treat as normal then become normalized for everyone else. The Internet is kind of a great equalizer in many respects. Kids don't look at you doing a thing and think, oh, that's only for adults. They think that's for everybody. It's hard for a lot of people who are young to draw distinctions between what behaviors are OK or for adults and what are OK for kids. As an example, if kids see you setting up a secret adults only chat room, they'll do the same thing. But with other kids and sometimes not kids will sneak in. Does that mean you should never do it in this community? I'd argue that the answer is yes. I've evolved a bit on this topic over the last 10 years or so, but I definitely think we can do more to protect kids on the wiki by just straight up keeping adult content out of the community as a whole. Creeps exist. There's a lot of them in the world. And because of that, it's probably easy to just go, meh, not my problem. Where are their parents? Let them handle it. But that's abrogating your responsibility. If your kids be careful and legitimately ask an adult in your life, if you're ever uncomfortable with something happening to you online. And if you're an adult and you've chosen to remain part of a community where over half of the users are kids, be vigilant and be careful. That's it. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button, then hit the notification bell next to that. So you're notified when I upload new videos. If you'd like to support the channel, head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarian and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Cingeriki, who's pledged to the hundred dollars. It is nice to know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again soon.