Can both of these things be true at once? I kind of get what you are trying to say, but it seems to me that if it's a drawn image, the concept of "age" as we usually think about it is pretty meaningless. The artist could say she is 200 years old and that would technically be true because the author gets to define her (fictional) age. Having said that, if you showed wikipe-tan to a group of 100 people and asked them to estimate the age, I guarantee you the average would be considerably lower than 18.

Ofc it can. The point about age, is the age of the character. That it's a drawn image does not change that it's a character. The only difference there is that the character is imaginary but even imaginary things have traits such as age. As for the answer a 100 people would give when asked to guess her age, is completely irrelevant. If we asked 100 people to ask the age of The Flash, then even if all 100 guessed that he was 3, the character would still not be 3. A guess is exactly that, a guess. It has no bearing on the facts of the matter.

Interestingly, that lolicon picture you linked to (which I think even you will agree is designed to be sexually titillating) was drawn by the same person who drew wikipe-tan. Makes you wonder whether it's an innocent as you're claiming, given that the artist is in the business of producing images of sexualized cartoon children.

Indeed it was. It was drawn exactly because Wales did not want a lolicon version of Wikipe-tan to be used. As for it being innocent or not, that's just a silly argument. The whole thign is on the level of "Hitler liked cheese, therefor cheese is bad". And again, it's a drawing... They're NOT REAL PEOPLE.