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It was a classic love story, with all the trimmings. Two volunteer workers meet on the job and take a liking to each other. He's a clever wordsmith and a compelling presence. She's young, bubbly and full of life. She gives him a book he might like. He provides his own gift, and reveals that he has strong feelings for her. Shaken slightly at this new turn, she seeks solance in a mutual friend and forges a new bond which turns itself into a relationship. From there, the conflict begins: betrayal, harsh words, and hearts that turn to daggers.

Nothing you haven't read, watched or heard many times before... except the young bubbly girl was 15, the clever (and betrayed) wordsmith was 30, and they lived an ocean apart from each other. (She in England, he in Canada).

And the place where they met... was Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is full of people. People are great; they interact, enlighten, team up, and work together. Sometimes they even fall in love. Unfortunately, they also infight, attack, plot, and misread signals. And yes, sometimes they even fall in love with the entirely ill-advised person to fall in love with. And then the troubles begin.

[edit] What happened?

The specifics of the situation aren't important here, although of course we'll lay them out anyway, for the lurid among us. Basically, dude lives in Canada and has had what appears to be a few negative relationships with girls who were born in the same general time vicinity as himself. Some harsh accusations have been made against him, which he made the big mistake of trying to defend himself against online. This, naturally, made things worse. Unlucky in life, unlucky in love, a petulant paranoid victim of life's unfortunate bumps, he was destined for a solitary or at least payment-based social existence.

But then there was Wikipedia. Arms open, ready to take all comers, he was welcomed as all suckers who join the place are welcome. Roll up your sleeves, get in on the big editing job, and help build a huge free encyclopedia. Bravo! Of course, a lot of what got him going on the website was to correct the "lies" in articles on Wikipedia, but whatever gets you going, right? Moving away from protecting his already-tarnished "reputation", our brave hero turned to articles on Star Trek and getting his face into literately hundreds of user talk pages.

Somewhere along the line, he befriended a nice young lady, and here the new troubles began.

The details are muddled from way out here, but one thing is clear: at some point they exchanged gifts, and at some point she got a little uncomfortable, and at another point she started dating someone her age, and at that point he lost it. Lost it hard, lost it big, as a 30 year old might, but a 15 year old wouldn't. It got ugly, and it got ugly fast. Pretty much all parties have taken a big vacation from Wikipedia, forced or voluntary, and lives try to be rebuilt.

It's less about the details of that little car crash than what it represents.

[edit] Come on in, kids

Wikipedia, you see, appeals to children. And by that, we mean it's both appealing to them and also calls out to them intentionally.

After all, it was Jimbo himself who said:

I’m doing this for the child in Africa who is going to use free textbooks and reference works produced by our community and find a solution to the crushing poverty that surrounds him. — Jimbo Wales [1]

And kids love the site, with its endless trivia and quick-n-easy access to insanely-large cartoon databases. They love how easy it is to copy and paste out information from these entries and use them in book reports, saving them the time of reading the books. They love the bright colors in the entries, especially the ones that they would be stopped from reading in a library or in their parents' home.

But beyond the occasional boob, they also get the feeling of empowerment, because they too can edit the entries. They can get user accounts, tell people all about themselves, and then jump right in, even if they're barely as old as the Wikipedia software itself. It's like myspace but with no music blasting in the background or quite as many pictures of Tool.

Now, this leads to the natural question:

What could possibly go wrong with having gaggles of self-identifying children in an environment full of borderline fucked-up personalities that myopically concentrate on idealistic goals and plans and feel they're above the rest of the world?

What, indeed.

[edit] Versus

The "Aliens" in the title of this article refers, of course, to Wikipedians, who live in a world of their own. It's a world where if you let everyone bitch for years on end, where if you arbitrarily clump together people, facts, policies and rules with no strong sense of order, some incredible encyclopedia will come out of the process. In this stunningly beautiful alien utopia planet, these Ur-citizens will rise above the evidence of thousands of years of human civilization and work together, as harmonically as they can, towards a unified goal.

And that's great; some people spend all their lives trying to create a machine that generates more energy than it takes in. No harm, no foul. Good luck with that.

But what the aliens are unprepared for are the predators, people who use children on social websites as targets, who provide them with input and issues far beyond their abilities to process, who ply them with hints, insinuations, and complicated "feelings" they have to "express" to the nascent younglings.

This isn't an internet thing. It's a human thing. Assemble children in great numbers somewhere, especially when you seek out and advertise that you're kid-friendly, and there's some basic precautions you have to take.

Precautions Wikipedia simply does not take.

[edit] Warning signs

Children are not hard to find on Wikipedia. They upload pictures of themselves, self-identify as teenagers, and for a while (about a year) put together a little club, the Wikipedia Youth Foundation, which was meant to be some sort of Children's Union of Wikipedians, but which might as well have a little target painted on their little, smooth backs.

They even provide a user box to let you know, in case they haven't gotten around to putting their ages directly on their webpage.

Children, as stated, can go anywhere and do anything on Wikipedia that any other user can do; they can tramp through the sex pages with impunity, they can jump into conversations on any user page, and they can emesh themselves in interaction with anyone they choose... even people who, it might be said, would develop "feelings" for the fellow Wikipedians and wish to "express" them.

This is a ticking time bomb. All social websites have this problem and are taking steps. What is Wikipedia doing?

[edit] The Safety Equipment Will Be Installed at a Later Date

Well, not a whole lot. Registering on Wikipedia warns you about being civil and how to be a good citizen; it does not do a whole lot to determine your age and let you know if you might want to take it a little easy on the giving out of your Skype account. It certainly does nothing to ensure parental oversight, or for that matter create official Wikimedia Foundation policy that could be read by parents.

Like everything else, Wikipedia/Wikia/Wikimedia like to throw people at a problem. Foolish, disorganized, self-absorbed, politically overwrought people. Surely this mass of folks who can't even agree on what Notability is could certainly form a solid set of protections for underage users so that the environment is toxic to determined predators...

...right?

[edit] Houston, we have a problem

Jimbo Wales, of course, knows all about this problem; he's been working like a dog to hide any information about his daughter from the Interweb for the past couple of years. He used to have a domain dedicated to her with photos and other information; that's gone. And when we threw up a page about her that had been deleted (along with a dozen others we'd rescued from oblivion), he ignored any other issues and focused entirely on the information about his daughter. A father's prerogative, you might say, and that's true... it's just a shame he can't extend it a little to a few others as well.

And when Jimbo Wales' darling angel makes her big coming-out appearance on Wikipedia, to great fanfare and with her vital statistics passed around like baseball cards, is Jimbo going to sit around and let her jump into every single possible article, make all sorts of new friends, and join all sorts of "clubs" that leave her a sitting duck to the world and all it's dark places?

Well, we honestly hope not.

Because not all love stories have a happy ending.