Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20130701030702

A new American law came into effect at midnight today, 1 July, which affects Wikia in a fairly profound way. The law, abbreviated COPPA, essentially seeks to protect children on the internet. One way in which Wikia are complying with this law is to prevent anonymous editing on wikis whose topics are targeted towards children. This is because "anonymous editing" is essentially a misnomer. When you chose to edit without logging in, you give away your IP address. That's actually valuable information about you, because it can be used to help geolocate you — one of the very activities COPPA seeks to restrict.

So is Tardis a site that is aimed at children? After all, we cover K9 and The Sarah Jane Adventures. But we also cover Torchwood and the decidedly adult New Adventures book series.

This wiki participated in these discussions and presented a range of evidence for Staff to consider. We showed them a number of articles that argued for and against the theory that Doctor Who was aimed toward kids under 13.

After much thought, Wikia decided to look narrowly at the way the DWU is generally marketed in the United States, since the law is American.

This made things a lot easier, since it can be demonstrated with great ease that the typical American exhibition of Doctor Who these days is actually near or after what would be considered "Watershed" in the United Kingdom. On BBCA, new episodes typically air around 9pm. Even on secondary channels, like PBS, Doctor Who does not typically air on PBS-Kids, but just on straight-up PBS, usually at nights. Equally, a number of American fans came to the DWU by way of Torchwood. As is not the case in the United Kingdom, Torchwood developed a following completely independent of Doctor Who. And The Sarah Jane Adventures and K9 have had virtually no footprint in America. K9 had a one-day gig on SyFy and the majority of SJA episodes have never been broadcast here.

For these reasons, and others, Wikia have decided that the DWU is not marketed towards kids in the US. Accordingly, we we will not be closing our doors to IP editors any time soon. ''We remind all users that this is not a "safe for work" wiki. We cover every aspect of the DWU, which includes premarital sex, postmarital sex, casual sex, adultery, recreational drug use, prescription drug use, tobacco use, alcohol use, atheism, agnosticism, Anglicanism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and everything else that you could possibly object to. At some point in the thousands of stories this wiki covers, Doctor Who has touched on just about every aspect of life — none of which we censor.''  