http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=Denise&feedformat=atom WikiChristian - User contributions [en] 2024-03-29T09:23:14Z User contributions MediaWiki 1.32.1 http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Christian_wikis&diff=144387 Christian wikis 2007-05-30T10:19:44Z <p>Denise: Added Jesus-Wiki</p> <hr /> <div>__NOTOC__<br /> <br /> ==Synopsis==<br /> <br /> There are numerous wiki websites related to [[Christianity]]. One of the criticisms that adherents to various religious groups have had to wikipedia is that in attempting to maintain a neutral point of view, some of the teachings of their religion can be &quot;watered-down&quot; or altered. These critics also state that the neutral point of view is in the eye of the beholder. The first religious wiki was [http://clublet.com/c/c/why? Why Clublet]. Currently the largest Christian wikis include [[Theopedia]], WikiChristian and [[OrthodoxWiki]].<br /> <br /> ==Contents==<br /> <br /> {{topics}}<br /> * [[WikiChristian]]<br /> * [[Theopedia]]<br /> * [[OrthodoxWiki]]<br /> * [[Wikible]]<br /> * [[Christian Knowledge Base]]<br /> * [[CreationWiki]]<br /> * [[Jesus-Wiki]]<br /> <br /> {{opinions}}<br /> <br /> {{links}}<br /> * [http://www.ApologeticsWiki.com Apologetics Wiki]<br /> * [http://www.biblestudywiki.com Bible Study Wiki]<br /> * [http://bible.tmtm.com/wiki/Main_Page Bible Wiki]<br /> * [http://biblewiki.net/Bible_Wiki:About Bible Wiki Net]<br /> * [http://christianity.wikia.com/ Christianity Knowledge Base]<br /> * [http://theconnexion.net/compass/index.php/WikiNode Compass]<br /> * [http://meta.jesus-wiki.org/wiki/Main_Page Christianity Meta Wiki]<br /> * [http://www.creationwiki.net/ CreationWiki]<br /> * [http://www.faithpedia.co.uk Faithpedia]<br /> * [http://www.justsixdays.co.uk/site4/ J6Pedia]<br /> * [http://jesus-wiki.org Jesus-Wiki]<br /> * [http://mormonwiki.org/ MormonWiki Org]<br /> * [http://openbibleproject.org Open Bible Project]<br /> * [http://www.orthodoxwiki.org/ OrthodoxWiki]<br /> * [http://theology.wikicities.com Theology Wiki]<br /> * [http://www.theopedia.com/ Theopedia]<br /> * [http://www.tulipedia.org/ Tulipedia]<br /> * [http://www.thebible.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Wiki Bible]<br /> * [http://www.wikible.org/en Wikible]<br /> * [http://www.wikicath.org/ WikiCath]<br /> * [http://www.wikichristian.org/ WikiChristian]<br /> * [http://crosswire.org/wiki/ the CrossWire wiki]<br /> <br /> ==Main article==<br /> <br /> A wiki website is a site that allows users to add content, as on an internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. There are numerous wiki websites related to [[Christianity]]. <br /> <br /> The first wiki was set up by Ward Cunningham in 1995 [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory]. Wikipedia, the most well known wiki website, was started in 2001, and currently contains millions of articles. It contains thousands of articles related to [[religion]]. One of the criticisms that adherents to various religious groups have however is that in attempting to maintain a neutral point of view, some of the teachings of their religion can be &quot;watered-down&quot; or altered. These critics also state that the neutral point of view is in the eye of the beholder. In response to some of these criticism, explicitly [[Christian]] wiki websites have been set up. The majority of them adhere to a specific Christian [[denomination]] or tradition, including most that claim to be non-specifically &quot;Christian&quot; in nature. They tend to fall into three categories, Online [[Bible]] encyclopedias (of varying completeness and denominational emphases), general Christianity wikis without a specific denominational slant, and wikis devoted to a specific Christian denomination or tradition.<br /> <br /> ===History of Christian wikis===<br /> <br /> The first Christian wiki was clublet.com, begun by Richard Drake in 2000. Another early Christian wiki was Compass, which was set up by Richard Hall in early 2001. Although still online, this has been essentially empty for a number of years now. In 2004 WikiChristian was set up and was for a time the only Christian wiki that was not specifically denominational. Other wikis developed in early 2005 included Orthodox Wiki (for [[Eastern Orthodoxy]]) and Theopedia (for Reformed Protestantism).<br /> <br /> In more recent times there has been an explosion of Christian wikis, particularly &quot;Bible&quot; wikis dedicated to Biblical Christianity, such as Wikible.<br /> <br /> No Christian wikis have achieved anything like the numerical success of editors that wikipedia has. There are regular users particularly of Theopedia and OrthodoxWiki, and to a lesser extent WikiChristian, Wikible and Christianity Knowledge Base. Wikible keeps a running talley on the active user population of the different wikis - see [http://wikible.org/en/Christian_wikis Wikible's article on Christian wikis].<br /> <br /> {{returnto}} [[Christianity and the internet]]</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Jesus-Wiki&diff=144386 Jesus-Wiki 2007-05-30T10:18:35Z <p>Denise: Added info</p> <hr /> <div>==About Jesus-Wiki==<br /> Jesus-Wiki is a Christian wiki written from a &quot;Christian&quot; point of view. It is currently available in English, German, Finnish, Spanish, and French. There also is the central Jesus-Wiki Media to upload media files.<br /> <br /> ==Links==<br /> *http://jesus-wiki.org<br /> *[http://en.jesus-wiki.org/wiki/Jesus-Wiki:About_Jesus-Wiki About Jesus-Wiki]<br /> <br /> {{returnto}} [[Christian wikis]] | [[Christian Websites Index]]<br /> <br /> {{stub}}</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Christian_Websites_Index&diff=144385 Christian Websites Index 2007-05-30T10:12:43Z <p>Denise: Added Jesus-Wiki</p> <hr /> <div>==[[Christian wiki sites]]==<br /> <br /> '''A'''<br /> * [[AnglicanWiki]]<br /> <br /> '''B'''<br /> * [[BibleWiki]]<br /> <br /> '''C'''<br /> * [[Compass website]]<br /> * [[CARMPedia]]<br /> * [[ChristianMusic at WikiCities]]<br /> * [[CreationWiki]]<br /> <br /> '''J'''<br /> * [[J6Dpedia]]<br /> * [[Jesus-Wiki]]<br /> <br /> '''O'''<br /> * [[OrthodoxWiki]]<br /> <br /> '''T'''<br /> * [[Theopedia]]<br /> <br /> '''W'''<br /> * [[WikiChristian]]<br /> * [[Why Clubbet]]<br /> * [[Wikible]]<br /> <br /> ==[[Christian chatting and forum websites]]==<br /> <br /> '''C'''<br /> * [[Christian Forums]]<br /> <br /> '''E'''<br /> * [[Eagles Wings]]<br /> <br /> ==[[Bible sites]]==<br /> <br /> '''B'''<br /> * [[Bible Gateway]]<br /> ==[[Internet Radio]]==<br /> * [[Abiding Radio]] - [http://www.abidingradio.com abidingradio.com]<br /> <br /> ==[[Sites for Christian texts and documents]]==<br /> <br /> '''C'''<br /> * [[Christian Classics Ethereal Library]]<br /> <br /> ==[[Apologetics sites]]==<br /> <br /> '''C'''<br /> * [[CARM]]<br /> <br /> ==[[Denomination-specific websites]]==<br /> <br /> '''J'''<br /> * [[JustForCatholics]]<br /> <br /> ==[[Creation science websites]]==<br /> <br /> '''A'''<br /> * [[Answers in Genesis]]<br /> <br /> '''N'''<br /> * [[Northwest Creation Network]]<br /> <br /> ==[[General and miscellaneous sites on Christianity]]==<br /> <br /> '''J'''<br /> * [[Jeremiah Chronicles]]<br /> <br /> '''S'''<br /> * [http://search-jesus.com Search Jesus] Search engine focused on Jesus and Christianity<br /> <br /> {{returnto}} [[Christianity and the internet]]</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=User_talk:Denise&diff=144143 User talk:Denise 2007-05-06T06:38:31Z <p>Denise: /* Copyright Question */</p> <hr /> <div>Well, I just wanted to edit this page before going to bed... Because of the different time zones I expect somebody to stumble accross this page before I wake up again. So I guess it would be smart of me to post this question:<br /> <br /> Could somebody please give me a short summary of what has been discussed about the collaboration of Christian wikis? Some helpful links would do the job too... Thanks!<br /> <br /> - [[User:Denise|Denise]] 14:56, 17 September 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> <br /> Hi Denise,<br /> <br /> Hope you had a nice sleep. Regarding Christian wiki collaboration, some remarks by people have been left here: [[Talk:Christian wikis]].<br /> <br /> If you want to look around at other Christian wikis, you can look here: [[Christian wikis]] - the links to different wikis are at the bottom of the page<br /> <br /> I'd love for there to be more users at WikiChristian. It's pretty much just been me, and also [[Prab]] (he started the site and looks after it) and [[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] and the occasional other user here and there. I think that is one of the main problems with all of the Christian wikis around - there are a dozen or so of them, each with only a couple of users. Probably the most active one at the moment is [[Theopedia]] however that is quite specific in its aims and who is supposed to edit.<br /> <br /> At WikiChristian, the idea (or at least my feeling) is that it shouldn't be a replica of wikipedia. Instead of dry encyclopedia articles, I want WikiChristian to contain people's opinions and personal works as well as information / encyclopedia style articles. Take a look around and get a feel for the style. Look at [[Grace]], [[Love]], [[John 11]], [[John 3:16]], [[Bible]], [[Christian music]], [[As the Deer (song)]], [[Ten Commandments]], [[South Australia]], [[Jesus]] and so on to get a feel for how the site is set out. Stay and contribute if you feel comfortable, especially help with our [[Priority pages]]. Add your website into our <br /> [[Christianity and the internet]] section - [[Christian Websites Index]].<br /> <br /> Oh, and if pictures seem to be missing, or if you find a problem, let me know - there was a spammer a few days ago who caused havoc.<br /> <br /> --[[User:Graham grove|Graham grove]] 22:57, 17 September 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> PS - Good luck with your website!<br /> <br /> ==Copyright Question==<br /> <br /> Hey, Denise. I saw your question in the recent changes page; we are indeed still under the GFDL, as it states in [[Wikichristian:Copyrights]]. I've never really noticed that we don't have a GFDL icon at the bottom of the site until you mentioned it. I'll ask one of our webmasters if we could get one. See you around! -- [[User:P.B. Pilhet|P.B. Pilhet]] / [[User talk:P.B. Pilhet|Talk]] 13:28, 14 January 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> :I'm sorry I didn't answer your post sooner. I see you have a GFDL icon now. Funny thing is, Jesus-Wiki doesn't have one at the moment, because something isn't configured correctly in LocalSettings.php. I'll be updating to a new version of MediaWiki soon anyway, so I guess I can take care of that later. :-) How's everybody doing around here? God bless, --[[User:Denise|Denise]] 12:04, 5 May 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::No problem, everyone here knows you're busy managing other projects. Everything's been going fine here; our vandalism count is low, but we definitely could use some more article creation. How are things over at Jesus-Wiki? God bless you too, and your site. -- [[User:P.B. Pilhet|P.B. Pilhet]] / [[User talk:P.B. Pilhet|Talk]] 18:27, 5 May 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> :::I actually almost missed your message again, because the notification email was marked as spam automatically. I just saw it when I looked at the spam before deleting it. There's not a whole lot going on at Jesus-Wiki. I myself haven't been working on it a whole lot for the past few months, so I shouldn't be complaining to much, I guess. I just recently started working on it again. However, it is nice to know that at least three people (including me) are keeping an eye on all the language wikis of Jesus-Wiki and are deleting spam, even if nothing else is going on. God bless you too. --[[User:Denise|Denise]] 01:38, 6 May 2007 (EST)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=WikiChristian:Logo&diff=144141 WikiChristian:Logo 2007-05-05T17:09:01Z <p>Denise: Added gallery</p> <hr /> <div>We are working on designing a new Logo for Wikichristian! Please feel free to submit your own work by using the [[Special:Upload]] link and then linking your logo on this page with your username. Thanks in advance!<br /> <br /> The new logo with wikichristian, the free enclyclopedia with the Holy Bible in the middle in the back drop of a globe has been adopted. We also updated the the page background with a large globe with the inscription - God Loves You on the top. Leave your comments or suggestions below.<br /> --[[User:Prab|Prab]] 14:22, 25 December 2006 (EST)<br /> <br /> ==Uploaded works==<br /> <br /> &lt;gallery&gt;<br /> Image:Wclogo.png|Uploaded by [[User:Prab|Prab]]<br /> &lt;/gallery&gt;</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=User_talk:Denise&diff=144140 User talk:Denise 2007-05-05T17:04:21Z <p>Denise: /* Copyright Question */</p> <hr /> <div>Well, I just wanted to edit this page before going to bed... Because of the different time zones I expect somebody to stumble accross this page before I wake up again. So I guess it would be smart of me to post this question:<br /> <br /> Could somebody please give me a short summary of what has been discussed about the collaboration of Christian wikis? Some helpful links would do the job too... Thanks!<br /> <br /> - [[User:Denise|Denise]] 14:56, 17 September 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> <br /> Hi Denise,<br /> <br /> Hope you had a nice sleep. Regarding Christian wiki collaboration, some remarks by people have been left here: [[Talk:Christian wikis]].<br /> <br /> If you want to look around at other Christian wikis, you can look here: [[Christian wikis]] - the links to different wikis are at the bottom of the page<br /> <br /> I'd love for there to be more users at WikiChristian. It's pretty much just been me, and also [[Prab]] (he started the site and looks after it) and [[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] and the occasional other user here and there. I think that is one of the main problems with all of the Christian wikis around - there are a dozen or so of them, each with only a couple of users. Probably the most active one at the moment is [[Theopedia]] however that is quite specific in its aims and who is supposed to edit.<br /> <br /> At WikiChristian, the idea (or at least my feeling) is that it shouldn't be a replica of wikipedia. Instead of dry encyclopedia articles, I want WikiChristian to contain people's opinions and personal works as well as information / encyclopedia style articles. Take a look around and get a feel for the style. Look at [[Grace]], [[Love]], [[John 11]], [[John 3:16]], [[Bible]], [[Christian music]], [[As the Deer (song)]], [[Ten Commandments]], [[South Australia]], [[Jesus]] and so on to get a feel for how the site is set out. Stay and contribute if you feel comfortable, especially help with our [[Priority pages]]. Add your website into our <br /> [[Christianity and the internet]] section - [[Christian Websites Index]].<br /> <br /> Oh, and if pictures seem to be missing, or if you find a problem, let me know - there was a spammer a few days ago who caused havoc.<br /> <br /> --[[User:Graham grove|Graham grove]] 22:57, 17 September 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> PS - Good luck with your website!<br /> <br /> ==Copyright Question==<br /> <br /> Hey, Denise. I saw your question in the recent changes page; we are indeed still under the GFDL, as it states in [[Wikichristian:Copyrights]]. I've never really noticed that we don't have a GFDL icon at the bottom of the site until you mentioned it. I'll ask one of our webmasters if we could get one. See you around! -- [[User:P.B. Pilhet|P.B. Pilhet]] / [[User talk:P.B. Pilhet|Talk]] 13:28, 14 January 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> *I'm sorry I didn't answer your post sooner. I see you have a GFDL icon now. Funny thing is, Jesus-Wiki doesn't have one at the moment, because something isn't configured correctly in LocalSettings.php. I'll be updating to a new version of MediaWiki soon anyway, so I guess I can take care of that later. :-) How's everybody doing around here? God bless, --[[User:Denise|Denise]] 12:04, 5 May 2007 (EST)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=WikiChristian_talk:Copyrights&diff=143392 WikiChristian talk:Copyrights 2007-01-14T10:39:16Z <p>Denise: signature</p> <hr /> <div>== Is it still GFDL? ==<br /> <br /> Hi!<br /> <br /> I'm trying to figure out what copyright status the content of this wiki has and noticed that there's no icon on the bottom left corner of the articles. As I see from [[Wikichristian:Copyrights]], the contents used to be/are under the GFDL. Is this still true?<br /> <br /> GBY! [[User:Denise|Denise]] 05:39, 14 January 2007 (EST)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=WikiChristian_talk:Copyrights&diff=143391 WikiChristian talk:Copyrights 2007-01-14T10:38:56Z <p>Denise: Is it still GFDL?</p> <hr /> <div>== Is it still GFDL? ==<br /> <br /> Hi!<br /> <br /> I'm trying to figure out what copyright status the content of this wiki has and noticed that there's no icon on the bottom left corner of the articles. As I see from [[Wikichristian:Copyrights]], the contents used to be/are under the GFDL. Is this still true?<br /> <br /> GBY! Denise</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=User:Denise&diff=70592 User:Denise 2006-09-18T21:34:50Z <p>Denise: </p> <hr /> <div>Hi!<br /> <br /> My name is Denise (as you can imagine), I was born on May 24th, 1988 in Switzerland and was raised here too. My father is Swiss; my mother's American and so that makes me Swiss-American. I'm very happy that I was raised in a Christian family and I'm a Christian as well (Methodist, but the denomination isn't very import, I think.).<br /> <br /> I've just recently started the multilangual Christian wiki project [http://jesus-wiki.org Jesus-Wiki]. It was only at the beginning of September that I noticed there are other Christian wikis - at least in English. But because I've primarily been working on the [http://de.jesus-wiki.org German version of Jesus-Wiki] that should't be too big of a problem. It should be very easy to collaborate with other Christian wikis. And that's what I want to do. Right now it looks like I'll be giving up most of the multilangual aspects of Jesus-Wiki to concentrate on the German version and just collaborate with other Christian wikis.<br /> <br /> GBY! [[User:Denise|Denise]] 14:53, 17 September 2006 (PDT)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=User:Denise&diff=70591 User:Denise 2006-09-18T21:34:33Z <p>Denise: </p> <hr /> <div>Hi!<br /> <br /> My name is Denise (as you can imagine), I was born on May 24th, 1988 in Switzerland and was raised here too. My father is Swiss; my mother's American and so that makes me Swiss-American. I'm very happy that I was raised in a Christian family and I'm a Christian as well (Methodist, but the denomination isn't very import, I think.).<br /> <br /> I've just recently started my own multilangual Christian wiki project [http://jesus-wiki.org Jesus-Wiki]. It was only at the beginning of September that I noticed there are other Christian wikis - at least in English. But because I've primarily been working on the [http://de.jesus-wiki.org German version of Jesus-Wiki] that should't be too big of a problem. It should be very easy to collaborate with other Christian wikis. And that's what I want to do. Right now it looks like I'll be giving up most of the multilangual aspects of Jesus-Wiki to concentrate on the German version and just collaborate with other Christian wikis.<br /> <br /> GBY! [[User:Denise|Denise]] 14:53, 17 September 2006 (PDT)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=User:Denise&diff=70590 User:Denise 2006-09-18T21:31:09Z <p>Denise: </p> <hr /> <div>Hi!<br /> <br /> My name is Denise (as you can imagine), I was born on May 24th, 1988 in Switzerland and was raised here too. My father is Swiss; my mother's American and so that makes me Swiss-American. I'm very happy that I was raised in a Christian family and I'm a Christian as well (Methodist, but the denomination isn't very import, I think.).<br /> <br /> I've just recently started my own multilangual Christian wiki project at [http://jesus-wiki.org Jesus-Wiki]. It was only at the beginning of September that I noticed there are other Christian wikis - at least in English. But because I've primarily been working on the [http://de.jesus-wiki.org German version of Jesus-Wiki] that should't be too big of a problem. It should be very easy to collaborate with other Christian wikis. And that's what I want to do. Right now it looks like I'll be giving up most of the multilangual aspects of Jesus-Wiki to concentrate on the German version and just collaborate with other Christian wikis.<br /> <br /> GBY! [[User:Denise|Denise]] 14:53, 17 September 2006 (PDT)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Christian_wikis&diff=70588 Christian wikis 2006-09-18T11:59:46Z <p>Denise: Added Jesus-Wiki</p> <hr /> <div>{{summary | text=The history of wiki websites specifically related to [[Christianity]] is much more recent than that of wikis in general. One of the criticisms that adherents to various religious groups have had to wikipedia is that in attempting to maintain a neutral point of view, some of the teachings of their religion can be &quot;watered-down&quot; or altered. These critics also state that the neutral point of view is in the eye of the beholder. The first religious wiki was [http://clublet.com/c/c/why? Why Clublet Why Clubbet]. Currently the largest Christian wikis include [[Theopedia]], WikiChristian and [[OrthodoxWiki]].}}<br /> <br /> {{overview}}<br /> <br /> {{topics}}<br /> * [[WikiChristian]]<br /> * [[Theopedia]]<br /> * [[OrthodoxWiki]]<br /> * [[Wikible]]<br /> * [[Christian Knowledge Base]]<br /> <br /> {{opinions}}<br /> <br /> {{links}}<br /> * [http://www.biblestudywiki.com Bible Study Wiki]<br /> * [http://bible.tmtm.com/wiki/Main_Page Bible Wiki]<br /> * [http://biblewiki.net/Bible_Wiki:About About Page Bible Wiki Net]<br /> * [http://www.thebible.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page The Wiki Bible]<br /> * [http://openbibleproject.org The Open Bible Project]<br /> * [http://www.wikible.org/en Wikible]<br /> * [http://christianity.wikia.com/ Christianity Knowledge Base]<br /> * [http://christ.relately.com/wiki/ChristWiki:About Christ Wiki]<br /> * [http://www.faithpedia.co.uk Faithpedia]<br /> * [http://jesus-wiki.org Jesus-Wiki]<br /> * [http://www.theowiki.com/ Theowiki]<br /> * [http://theology.wikicities.com Theology Wiki]<br /> * [http://www.wikichristian.org/ WikiChristian]<br /> * [http://theconnexion.net/compass/index.php/Compass:About Compass]<br /> * [http://www.creationwiki.net/ CreationWiki]<br /> * [http://www.justsixdays.co.uk/site4/ J6Pedia]<br /> * [http://mormonwiki.org/ MormonWiki Org]<br /> * [http://www.orthodoxwiki.org/ OrthodoxWiki]<br /> * [http://www.theopedia.com/ Theopedia]<br /> * [http://www.tulipedia.org/ Tulipedia]<br /> * [http://www.wikicath.org/ WikiCath]<br /> <br /> {{returnto}} [[Christianity and the internet]]</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Talk:Christian_wikis&diff=70587 Talk:Christian wikis 2006-09-18T11:25:43Z <p>Denise: Added something to 'How I think Christian wiki collaboration should be'</p> <hr /> <div>[[Talk:Christian wikis/Archive 1]]<br /> <br /> ==An open letter to users and administrators of the various different Christian wikis==<br /> <br /> Hello,<br /> <br /> Thanks for reading my two cents worth. As a bit of background information, my name is G. Grove and you can contact me at graham_grove@yahoo.com.au to discuss any of the following issues. I've been involved in Christian wikis for a while now. In fact, I first tried to set up a Christianity book in wikibooks 2 years ago, but then I discovered that there were three other Christian wikis at the time and I left the wikibook and joined WikiChristian. At the time there was also Compass and Theopedia, but not anything else. In an attempt to try and get WikiChristian used more I started the wikipedia article &quot;Christian wikis&quot; and have since watched an explosion of links appear. That there are all these people wanting to be involved in spreading the gospel and knowledge of Jesus and Christianity through wikis is a wonderful thing. I especially respect those users and administrators who acknowledge other Christian wiki sites as well as their own. Every one of these wikis has some excellent points. Theopedia is full of academic articles; wikible is intelligently set out; biblewiki is commendable for its extensive linking; wikiChristian is admirable because of its attempt to cover all things Christian including be a directory for all the churches of the world; and I could go on and on about each wiki.<br /> <br /> Despite all these wonderful qualities and the hearts behind them, I believe Christian wikis are failing in what I see as their two most important objectives in glorify God. Firstly, to be a body of knowledge where Christians actually come to learn about a topic, and to actively be involved in writing and updating articles; and secondly, to be a witness to non-Christians about what Christianity is all about. It is obvious to me that the wikis are not used by more than a couple people for each site, and that non-Christians are not reading them either. Why is this failure occurring?<br /> <br /> I believe there is one very important overriding fact that is stifling the use and growth of all of these wikis. They are all essentially modelled closely on Wikipedia. Why is this a problem? Well, wikipedia is a great encyclopedia – a fantastic reference and very useable and helpful. So, if I want to know about say, the “Coptic Orthodox Church” why would I go anywhere else?! I would only go anywhere else if that anywhere else presenting the information differently and allowed me to easily see what I was most interested in. I might for example be interested in knowing about the persecution of the Coptic church in Egypt today. To learn about that, I am going to want read testimonies about peoples experiences living in Egypt. I might want to know about the formation of the Coptic church. To learn about this, I am going to want to firstly read an encylopedia style overview article about the council of Chalcedon and monophysitism, but then I going to want to read different peoples views on interpreting these topics – their opinions are important because I know that there are many interpretations – there is not perhaps one “Christian viewpoint” for this. However, I might want to find a local Coptic church to visit – and so I would need a list or index of Coptic churches – their addresses and service times and what language they were in. Now Wikipedia wouldn’t be a particularly useful source for some of what I want and certainly isn’t set out in a way that it is easy to find some of that information. No, the wiki I am looking for would be different, however, it just doesn’t exist currently.<br /> <br /> There are also lots of other little factors that I believe stifle the growth of the various Christian wikis. These include<br /> <br /> # The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous<br /> # The complaints that seem to arise whenever someone writes an article in an essay style presenting his viewpoint, rather than in an encyclopedia style. Articles should be able to have sentences starting with “I think”. Now these are clearly individual opinion articles, and so need to be marked as such. But Christianity is a personal religion, and people have opinions which differ. “I think” is valid.<br /> # Vandalism – but I don’t know what to do about that – perhaps the only way to stop it is to have a critical number of users<br /> # The unwritten rule that an article about the local church down the road is not acceptable. What is wrong with writing an article about my church down the road and writing about its minister, congregation, teaching, music and service times? Nothing as far as I can see!<br /> # The layout is never particularly logical.<br /> <br /> There are I’m sure lots more issues that other people have thought of. And of course you may vehemently disagree with me on each or every point. I welcome comments. Please leave comments on WikiChristian's “Christian wikis” talk page (http://www.wikichristian.org/index.php/Talk:Christian_wikis) (so others can read them, or email me. I have been fiddling with ideas, templates and trialling out different formats for a Christian wiki that I believe would work – it would hopefully be acceptable to those who want an encyclopedia, those who want testimonies, those who want opinions and discussion, those who want stacks of information with directories of churches, lyrics of songs and public domain texts. Please take a look at [[Christianity]] for an example of what a template of one possible way this could be done. <br /> <br /> Thanks for your time. I think those of us who want a Christian wiki need some discussion, and perhaps we need to put together a larger group of people to work on one encompassing wiki rather than dozens of small wikis.<br /> <br /> Graham<br /> <br /> (--[[User:Graham grove|Graham grove]] 21:55, 24 July 2006 (PDT))<br /> <br /> ===Point-by-point responses from Tom===<br /> I appreciate the comments. I don't really disagree with any of it. I think some of the similarity with Wikipedia is an effort not to re-invent the wheel. For example, in the area of organization of the Wiki. Of course there are other aspects than just organizational and logistical things. In addition, we also need to remember that there are many people in the world that haven't even heard of Wikipedia, so it shouldn't be too surprising that Christian wikis are lacking in editorial support. Here are some responses to your points... --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous<br /> #:Interesting idea, I think I like it. Especially for citing articles. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> #:Some people prefer to remain anonymous. I, for example, don't mind using my first name on my signature, but I'd rather not advertise my last name to, literally, the whole world. Also, most people like &quot;unhelpful usernames&quot; because they can use the same one across different websites. I also think it's a good brain excercise for all of us to make the effort at associating a username with a person's real name (if the user even chooses to give it to us in the firstplace). --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:40, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The complaints that seem to arise whenever someone writes an article in an essay style presenting his viewpoint, rather than in an encyclopedia style. Articles should be able to have sentences starting with “I think”. Now these are clearly individual opinion articles, and so need to be marked as such. But Christianity is a personal religion, and people have opinions which differ. “I think” is valid.<br /> #:I agree. &quot;I&quot; statements should be included somehow. If you think about it, every statement is an opinion, even encyclopedic writings are opinions from various points of view, although they may be more educated than the average person. The only trouble I see is in how to merge encyclopedia and user commentary. I'd love to see what others think about that! --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # Vandalism – but I don’t know what to do about that – perhaps the only way to stop it is to have a critical number of users<br /> #:I pretty much haven't had any vandalism at Wikible for a few months now. I use keyword filters, captchas, a username registration blacklist, and a user creation log to keep track of who registers. And I still allow anonymous users to edit and add content, and all registered users are free to edit the Main Page. In fact, the only page thta no one can edit but me is the Copyright notice, which I think is self-explanatory why I did that. Other than that, almost anyone can edit it. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The unwritten rule that an article about the local church down the road is not acceptable. What is wrong with writing an article about my church down the road and writing about its minister, congregation, teaching, music and service times? Nothing as far as I can see!<br /> #:I agree with that. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> #:Can you give some links to examples of where people have found this to be a problem? --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:47, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The layout is never particularly logical.<br /> #:Layout? What are you referring to? --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Thoughts from JJ===<br /> G. Grove, I've noticed your comments about inter-Christian wikis over the past several months,[http://www.wikible.org/en/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&amp;oldid=15783#Joining_together] so I know that there are at least three of us with similar concerns. Tom had actually started a ChristianWikis site to address these concerns, although it kind of fell through the cracks. I have expressed similar concerns on both Wikible ([http://www.wikible.org/en/index.php?title=User_talk:Admin&amp;oldid=15680#Wikipedia_and_Theopedia_collaboration Wikipedia and Theopedia collaboration]) and the BibleWiki ([http://bible.tmtm.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&amp;oldid=226363#Differentiating_BibleWiki_from_Wikipedia Differentiating BibleWiki from Wikipedia]), although I haven't gotten a chance to elaborate on the Christian-point-of-view problems that I've noticed from the beginning. For now, I've been content with concentrating my efforts on BibleWiki and Wikible (see my Theopedia link above for reasons why, as well as the [http://www.wikible.org/en/Wikible:About Wikible:About] page), but particularly on Wikipedia for general articles since there is a larger audience there. While the splintering of the Christian community is frustrating, I think it's also encouraging to know that a lot of people are competing to create the &quot;best&quot; Christian wiki; everyone has different web design skills, so some of the Christian wikis have better features than others&amp;mdash;survival of the fittest, if you will.<br /> <br /> Therefore, in terms of content, I think we're doing well; community, though, is indeed a problem. I haven't explored the options very much at this point, but Tom's ChristianWikis site idea was a good one; a site that concentrates on collaboration and community but completely leaves out the encyclopedic content. This community site would also be helpful for people to standardize wiki codes of conduct and syntax rules, as well as direct visitors to the sites with the most developed articles on certain topics. In this way, content would continue to be developed on the individual wikis since they all have different focuses. Another option is to try to center the inter-wiki discussion on one of the existing wikis, but make a clearly defined statement about the community being separate from the site's own faith-biased content.<br /> <br /> Please see my individual responses in Tom's section above, as well. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:34, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> I've been browsing around WikiChristian a little more, concentrating particularly on the site organization and layout. Graham, your ideas on this page present some major changes to WikiChristian! While I like your suggestions about making WikiChristian more '''testimony-oriented''', I think it presents a lot of challenges. To do this effectively, we really need to think carefully about how the site should be organized and make sure we have documentation on it. The current [[Wikichristian:Tutorial]] is very '''Wikipedia-oriented''', so people are going to need to understand that WikiChristian is very different from most neutral-point-of-view MediaWiki sites. Here are just a few initial things I've thought of. Please feel free to add commentary to them, similar to the way Tom has done it above.<br /> #WikiChristian could learn a lot from Wikipedia/Wikimedia formatting guidelines. See particularly the Organizing links at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents#For_editors - Right now, it seems like there are just a bunch of links everywhere, but no organization; the overdose of nav links (world churchs, bible dictionaries, etc.) is distracting, too.<br /> #Christian wikis are traditionally &quot;Wikipedia-oriented&quot; because it's hard to organize user-edited content if a lot of it is personal opinion/experience. We really need a good system of categories and/or list pages that would stay up-to-date as people add content.<br /> #Your topics on the [[Christianity]] page seem to be more like Portals in the Wikipedia-sense. Using &lt;code&gt;(overview)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;(G.G.)&lt;/code&gt; at the end of article titles seems odd to me. Again, I guess I would put those kinds of details in categories.<br /> <br /> My apologies for all the criticism. I'm just wanting to get the wiki well-oiled so visitors don't take test drives and end up crashing, if you know what I mean. Blessings to you... --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 20:22, 26 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> Since the Christianity Knowledge Base is open for anyone to edit, I've started a collaboration page to focus on these ideas. Graham, I'm not sure if this is what you're interested in, but it's worth mentioning: http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Christianity_Knowledge_Base:ChristianKM --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 13:49, 15 August 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Addressing the issue of brackets for &quot;(overview)&quot; or &quot;(user-name)&quot; etc.===<br /> <br /> Thanks J.J. for your comments. All your criticisms are welcome. Your points are good ones. I suppose my feeling is that portals and categories don't actually work that well. At least, I never really browse for my information by clicking through category or portal listings. Also, they are confusing to new users - at least they were to me when I first discovered wikis. I agree it is odd putting &quot;(overview)&quot; or &quot;(G.G.)&quot; after a title. The reason I've been doing that though is to make the article clear. If it has &quot;(G.G.)&quot; after it, then I mean that it is my original work and is an opinion. If it has &quot;(overview)&quot; after it then it means it is an encyclopedia, neutral point of view article. Also then that leaves room for &quot;(quotes)&quot; for any topic etc. For example, if you look at [[Church]] you'll see the main page is &quot;Church&quot; which has a brief summary and then the sub-links which incluide [[Church (overview)]] which hopefully would become the large encyclopedia style article but then there are also links for sub-topics and links for opinion articles such as [[What is the Church? (G.G.)]] and [[The Church (justforcatholics.org)]] as well as links for quotes about the church at [[Church (quotes)]] and a link for brief forum-style discussion about the church [[Church (discussion)]]. So although it is a little odd, I still think ultimately it allows for growth and personal articles. Let me know what you think. --[[User:Graham grove|Graham grove]] 21:42, 26 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> :One of the problems with the parenthesis in the title is that there are other non-topic pages that don't have parenthesis; I think it would get confusing as to what's a topic and what's an article/opinion.<br /> <br /> :How about a Topic: namespace instead of Portal? Also, instead of [[Template:Overview]] showing ''An overview of ''[[Church (overview)|Church]], it would probably be less confusing if it showed the actual link, like ''See [[Church (overview)]] for a more detailed article.'' [[Template:Opinions]] and [[Template:Quotes]] would be changed similarly. <br /> <br /> :I think this may work out well if we have a good how-to guide on making topic pages, maybe even using a [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Substitution subst] template to start from. I may make my own prototype at [[Talk:Christianity/Dev]] (with closer adherence to [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents#For_editors Wikimedia formatting standards]) if you think that would be helpful. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 19:11, 27 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ::Please centralize discussion related to my dev page at [[Wikichristian talk:Topics]]. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 11:10, 3 August 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Thoughts from Ben (CKB)===<br /> ''I'm copying this from the Christianity Knowledge Base since it brings up some more collaboration ideas. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 11:08, 10 August 2006 (PDT)''<br /> <br /> Here's another problem with Christian wikis: They're hosted on private sites, therefore there is no &quot;centrality&quot; to them. I think ''this'' wiki, since it's hosted by [[Wikipedia:Wikia|Wikia Inc.]], is more &quot;central&quot;. I think it might be good for this wiki to specialize in apologetics.<br /> <br /> What we could do is perhaps form some sort of ChristianWiki Foundation (sort of like the [[Wikipedia:MediaWiki Foundation|MediaWiki Foundation]]) and, under that heading, have a &quot;Christian Meta Wiki&quot;, which would work like [http://meta.wikimedia.org/ Meta-Wiki], and under that heading have different projects: One for encyclopedic articles, one for general Christian apologetics that links to wikis of different denominations to show what they think on different topics, one for an international church directory, one for Christian music of all kinds, and perhaps some other projects as well. New projects and/or the joining of existing projects would be discussed at the &quot;Meta-Wiki&quot;. If it was done this way, we wouldn't be modeled after Wikipedia, but after the foundation that started Wikipedia - so we'd have all of the advantages without the drawbacks, you see? --[http://rlds.wikia.com/wiki/User:BenMcLean BenMcLean] 13:54, 27 July 2006 (UTC)<br /> <br /> :I attempted to respond to this same letter and work with Graham at WikiChristian, but I wasn't getting any interest there; plus, the MediaWiki version there is grossly outdated, making it hard to work on. '''Ben''', I like your thoughts about a Christian Meta, but I think CKB could probably serve as this central hub. It is already on Wikia, providing a reliable server location. We could redesign this Community Portal (CP) (maybe even the Welcome page) to emphasize a &quot;Collaboration&quot; page (or set of pages, maybe featuring the Forum namespace). I don't think we would need a whole, separate, site just for collaboration purposes. This CP could also emphasize a separate CKB-only CP. I like your IRC idea below, too.<br /> <br /> :Also, in working on a [http://www.wikible.org/en/Wikible:Christian_wikis Christian wikis] chart over at Wikible, I noticed that CKB and ChristWiki have very different page counts (528 vs. 11911). Why would ChristWiki have so many more considering that it's a fork of CKB? Does Wikia calculate it differently? See my chart and footnote for more details. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 20:39, 7 August 2006 (UTC)<br /> <br /> ===Ideas of [[User:Denise|Denise]]===<br /> <br /> A few months ago I started my own multilangual Christian wiki project [http://jesus-wiki.org Jesus-Wiki]. But I've only just recently really started to work on it. At the beginning of September I finally noticed that there are other Christian wikis around. But because I've primarily been working on the German version of Jesus-Wiki, that shouldn't be a problem concerning the Christian wiki collaboration.<br /> <br /> As I've only just discovered that there's a discussion about Christian wiki collaboration, I don't really know what has been going on so far. So if I mention something that's already been said and discussed: I apologize for that.<br /> <br /> '''How I think Christian wiki collaboration should be'''<br /> <br /> I think there should be a multilangual wiki collaboration that is organized in a similar way as [http://wikipedia.org Wikipedia]. There should be one &quot;content wiki&quot; (a wiki with articles, etc.) for every language, plus one central Media Pool (or whatever you want to call it). It saves space and work (licensing, uploading, description, etc.). Maybe there could be another wiki with the purpose of organising the collaboration between the different languages. But the Media Pool could have that function. I think [http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Christianity_Knowledge_Base:ChristianKM ChristianKM] is a good idea. Maybe it could be used for now. But it should be renamed, as somebody has mentioned. Of course there could be some specialized wikis (like [http://wikible Wikible] and [http://creationwiki.org CreationWiki]) that fill some special needs and concentrate on a specific aspect of Christianity. In general I think there should be a wiki system with general Christian topics written from a Christian point of view. As far as I know there have been [http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Christianity_Knowledge_Base_talk:Christian_point_of_view discussions] about what a Christian point of view should be. I haven't gotten involved in those yet.<br /> <br /> Why do I think there should be only one wiki per language?<br /> <br /> #It takes a lot of work to set up a wiki (organisation, structure, getting people involved, etc.)<br /> #We don't have enough people involved to be able to spare anybody. There should be as many people concentrated on one wiki as possible.<br /> #Overlapping articles also are a waste of time and work.<br /> #The whole purpose of Christian wikis should be to unify and create an overview of Christian ideas (and give more details too, of course). We don't all have to have exactly the same opinion, but at least we should find a way to work together. By creating varouns wikis for every set of ideas we would just be avoiding the whole problem and not solving it. If we don't work together, we don't need wikis. And if Wikipedia can do it we should be ashamed of ourselves if we, callins ourselves Christians (= one body!!!) and saying we're being guided by the Holy Spirit, don't manage to do at least as well.<br /> #If the wikis are organized well enough there shouldn't be any problems with being able to find the information we want. It's just a question of structure.<br /> #There should be even more reasons. Please feel free to add them here!<br /> <br /> I also think that the '''wikis should have certain things in common''', for example the Statement of Faith, the Aboutpage, the General disclaimers, the Privacy policy, etc. The General disclaimers and the Privacy policy could be based upon the ones of Wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer General disclaimer], [http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy Privacy policy]). Those articles deal with some problems of this world. So why not use a solution given by an organisation of this world as long as it doesn't conflict with God's word? Wikipedia must have a lot of experience with legal problems and I don't want to waste much of my time on law related stuff.<br /> <br /> There also is a domain problem. What URL should be used? I imagine that we all agree that the wiki system should use one main domain and subdomains. What domain will be used and what will happen to the other domains I do not know. I personally like the domain [http://jesus-wiki.org] because Jesus should be the center of it all. And of course there also is the Logo problem. But as soon as the domain problem is solved, it should be easer to choose a logo or even create a new one.<br /> <br /> At least somebody has suggested to host the wikis at [http://wikia.com Wikia]. I don't like that idea.<br /> <br /> #There are ads. Some of them might say exactly the opposite of what we believe.<br /> #There are other free Christian (!) hosting sites without ads. As far as I know, WikiChristian has it's own server. I am hosted at [http://project62.com Project62]. The host is extremely nice and I haven't noticed any server problems. All wikis could be hosted there.<br /> <br /> '''What to copy from Wikipedia'''<br /> <br /> I believe that the content on the wikis should be structured in a similar way as Wikipedia's. This includes the choice of software (-&gt; [http://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]). I don't know what extensions we'd want to install, though - if any at all. It looks more familiar to new users and makes them feel at home a lot faster if they are used to Wikipedia. And of course there just are certain articles (for example the editing help pages) that we can't edit without the help of Wikipedia or information from other wikis of [http://wikimedia.org Wikimedia]. But apart from that I wouldn't collaborate with Wikipedia. It is a secular wiki and has a lot of information that doesn't promote the Christian beliefs. And I would want the Christian wikis to be as independent as possible. There only should be links to Wikipedia pages if some information used on the Christian wikis was taken from there. I'd only mention Wikipedia if it's really necessary.<br /> <br /> '''The wiki structure and organisation'''<br /> <br /> The wikis should be structured and organized in an understandable way. If you take a look at the [http://de.jesus-wiki.org German version of Jesus-Wiki] you'll notice that I haven't even started writing real articles. I want to build a good foundation first. I haven't even uploaded pictures (the only exception is the wiki logo). If I am unsure about how I want to organize the content, why should I expect anybody new to Jesus-Wiki to find anything at all? That person doesn't have a clue whatsoever of what is around! And if there is a good structure, it is easier to add new content and find something to work on as well. I personally prefer working on organizing wikis rather than writing articles.<br /> <br /> Somebody mentioned that '''categories''' don't seem to work. I disagree. I believe that the Categories (would) work if they were/are used right from the beginning. It's work, ut it will pay off in the long run. It could be hard to start or try to fix an unstructured categorising system after a lot of content has been added.<br /> <br /> Another way of linking pages are '''templates''' with overviews. Take [http://de.jesus-wiki.org/wiki/Vorlage:Navigation_Namensräume Vorlage:Navigation Namensräume] and [http://de.jesus-wiki.org/wiki/Vorlage:Navigation Über Jesus-Wiki Vorlage:Navigation Über Jesus-Wiki] as examples. Wikipedia uses them too and I think they work. These templates look the same or at least very similar on every page you use them on. That keeps people from landing on the same page over and over again and goind in circles. If they click on a link of an overview template, it will be easier for them to find the samy information again and it will help them get an idea of how the wiki content is structured.<br /> <br /> We also have to think about how we want to '''organize the main pages''' of the wikis (Home page, Community page, Help page, Aboutspage etc.). Wikipedia seems to have problems keeping the information seperate. I personally don't like it if the same information can be found in various places. I want to be sure I've read all the information that's available on the topic I want. Some examples of how I would structure it:<br /> <br /> *The Home page should welcome people, give a general overview of what is available on the wiki and make it easy to get a feel for the wiki itself as fast as possible.<br /> *The Aboutspage should talk about the general ideas behind the wiki and be linked with the Statement of Faith, the General disclaimers, etc. I have done so on Jesus-Wiki.<br /> *The Community page should help make new users feel at home and give information about the community on the wiki. It should also contain information about what is going on, how you can get involved, help you find other users and make the communication between user easier.<br /> *The Help page only should contain technical help. For people that could be totally lost there also can be links to the other main pages.<br /> <br /> As far as I know the wikis will want to have at least one translation of the '''Bible''' within the wiki. I haven't really thought about how this could be done. I have seen some wikis have one page per verse. This could make it hard to see the verse in a bigger context, but it makes the linking of verses easier. I think it would be helpful to create a separate namespace &quot;Bible&quot;. This causes the linking to be a bit harder, but it makes it easier to look for something in the Bible because you can restrict the search to the namespace &quot;Bible&quot;.<br /> <br /> I've also seen that [http://wikible.org Wikible] uses the same '''usernames''' for all of its wikis. If it isn't too hard to set up such a system, I think it would make sense to do so. It makes it a lot easier to find the same person on different wikis.<br /> <br /> '''Building a community'''<br /> <br /> It is very important for a wiki to have a stable and growing community if it itself is supposed to grow. The Community page should be a easy starting point for that. There also should be something similar to the '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Babel Babel system of Wikipedia]''', although we should give it a different name because Babel is connected with too much negative aspects and it isn't just used for language purposes anymore (at least not on the German Wikipedia). It can be used to find people with certain abilities, interests, of certain locations, etc. Another possibility would be to build a '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trust_network Trust network]'''. Both systems could come in very handy and help us build an active community. By using those templates new users can also become familiar with using them and they can get experience in editing pages. I believe a user feels more comfortable editing his/her own page instead of editing the Sandbox page. But I could be wrong.<br /> <br /> We'll also have to talk about getting more people involved sooner or later. But all advertisement and promotion attempts can wait until the wiki system has been set up to a certain extent.<br /> <br /> Well, I hope this post isn't too long. I wanted to say everything I think is important at the moment and hope I've been successful at doing so. Please post your comments.<br /> <br /> - [[User:Denise|Denise]] 02:42, 18 September 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> I forgot at least one aspect:<br /> <br /> '''The content of the Christian wiki system'''<br /> <br /> I do agree that the Christian wikis should be more than just normal encyclopedias. You should be able to add information about specific churches, testimonies, etc. But this would have to be organised in a good way. Using 'overview' and 'quotes' in brackets seems to confusing to me. The 'overview' page should be the main page of the topic (without word added in brackets). From there you could use special navigation templates that look the same on every page with similar functions and lead to a subpage with the pagename 'main page/subpage topic'. That way it is clear that it is a subpage. I'd only use subpages if it's really necessary. Most information could be included on the main page. You could start a subpage as soon as the information gets very personal. In general I'm against creating subpages.<br /> <br /> - [[User:Denise|Denise]] 03:51, 18 September 2006 (PDT)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Talk:Christian_wikis&diff=70586 Talk:Christian wikis 2006-09-18T10:51:56Z <p>Denise: Fixed a title problem</p> <hr /> <div>[[Talk:Christian wikis/Archive 1]]<br /> <br /> ==An open letter to users and administrators of the various different Christian wikis==<br /> <br /> Hello,<br /> <br /> Thanks for reading my two cents worth. As a bit of background information, my name is G. Grove and you can contact me at graham_grove@yahoo.com.au to discuss any of the following issues. I've been involved in Christian wikis for a while now. In fact, I first tried to set up a Christianity book in wikibooks 2 years ago, but then I discovered that there were three other Christian wikis at the time and I left the wikibook and joined WikiChristian. At the time there was also Compass and Theopedia, but not anything else. In an attempt to try and get WikiChristian used more I started the wikipedia article &quot;Christian wikis&quot; and have since watched an explosion of links appear. That there are all these people wanting to be involved in spreading the gospel and knowledge of Jesus and Christianity through wikis is a wonderful thing. I especially respect those users and administrators who acknowledge other Christian wiki sites as well as their own. Every one of these wikis has some excellent points. Theopedia is full of academic articles; wikible is intelligently set out; biblewiki is commendable for its extensive linking; wikiChristian is admirable because of its attempt to cover all things Christian including be a directory for all the churches of the world; and I could go on and on about each wiki.<br /> <br /> Despite all these wonderful qualities and the hearts behind them, I believe Christian wikis are failing in what I see as their two most important objectives in glorify God. Firstly, to be a body of knowledge where Christians actually come to learn about a topic, and to actively be involved in writing and updating articles; and secondly, to be a witness to non-Christians about what Christianity is all about. It is obvious to me that the wikis are not used by more than a couple people for each site, and that non-Christians are not reading them either. Why is this failure occurring?<br /> <br /> I believe there is one very important overriding fact that is stifling the use and growth of all of these wikis. They are all essentially modelled closely on Wikipedia. Why is this a problem? Well, wikipedia is a great encyclopedia – a fantastic reference and very useable and helpful. So, if I want to know about say, the “Coptic Orthodox Church” why would I go anywhere else?! I would only go anywhere else if that anywhere else presenting the information differently and allowed me to easily see what I was most interested in. I might for example be interested in knowing about the persecution of the Coptic church in Egypt today. To learn about that, I am going to want read testimonies about peoples experiences living in Egypt. I might want to know about the formation of the Coptic church. To learn about this, I am going to want to firstly read an encylopedia style overview article about the council of Chalcedon and monophysitism, but then I going to want to read different peoples views on interpreting these topics – their opinions are important because I know that there are many interpretations – there is not perhaps one “Christian viewpoint” for this. However, I might want to find a local Coptic church to visit – and so I would need a list or index of Coptic churches – their addresses and service times and what language they were in. Now Wikipedia wouldn’t be a particularly useful source for some of what I want and certainly isn’t set out in a way that it is easy to find some of that information. No, the wiki I am looking for would be different, however, it just doesn’t exist currently.<br /> <br /> There are also lots of other little factors that I believe stifle the growth of the various Christian wikis. These include<br /> <br /> # The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous<br /> # The complaints that seem to arise whenever someone writes an article in an essay style presenting his viewpoint, rather than in an encyclopedia style. Articles should be able to have sentences starting with “I think”. Now these are clearly individual opinion articles, and so need to be marked as such. But Christianity is a personal religion, and people have opinions which differ. “I think” is valid.<br /> # Vandalism – but I don’t know what to do about that – perhaps the only way to stop it is to have a critical number of users<br /> # The unwritten rule that an article about the local church down the road is not acceptable. What is wrong with writing an article about my church down the road and writing about its minister, congregation, teaching, music and service times? Nothing as far as I can see!<br /> # The layout is never particularly logical.<br /> <br /> There are I’m sure lots more issues that other people have thought of. And of course you may vehemently disagree with me on each or every point. I welcome comments. Please leave comments on WikiChristian's “Christian wikis” talk page (http://www.wikichristian.org/index.php/Talk:Christian_wikis) (so others can read them, or email me. I have been fiddling with ideas, templates and trialling out different formats for a Christian wiki that I believe would work – it would hopefully be acceptable to those who want an encyclopedia, those who want testimonies, those who want opinions and discussion, those who want stacks of information with directories of churches, lyrics of songs and public domain texts. Please take a look at [[Christianity]] for an example of what a template of one possible way this could be done. <br /> <br /> Thanks for your time. I think those of us who want a Christian wiki need some discussion, and perhaps we need to put together a larger group of people to work on one encompassing wiki rather than dozens of small wikis.<br /> <br /> Graham<br /> <br /> (--[[User:Graham grove|Graham grove]] 21:55, 24 July 2006 (PDT))<br /> <br /> ===Point-by-point responses from Tom===<br /> I appreciate the comments. I don't really disagree with any of it. I think some of the similarity with Wikipedia is an effort not to re-invent the wheel. For example, in the area of organization of the Wiki. Of course there are other aspects than just organizational and logistical things. In addition, we also need to remember that there are many people in the world that haven't even heard of Wikipedia, so it shouldn't be too surprising that Christian wikis are lacking in editorial support. Here are some responses to your points... --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous<br /> #:Interesting idea, I think I like it. Especially for citing articles. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> #:Some people prefer to remain anonymous. I, for example, don't mind using my first name on my signature, but I'd rather not advertise my last name to, literally, the whole world. Also, most people like &quot;unhelpful usernames&quot; because they can use the same one across different websites. I also think it's a good brain excercise for all of us to make the effort at associating a username with a person's real name (if the user even chooses to give it to us in the firstplace). --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:40, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The complaints that seem to arise whenever someone writes an article in an essay style presenting his viewpoint, rather than in an encyclopedia style. Articles should be able to have sentences starting with “I think”. Now these are clearly individual opinion articles, and so need to be marked as such. But Christianity is a personal religion, and people have opinions which differ. “I think” is valid.<br /> #:I agree. &quot;I&quot; statements should be included somehow. If you think about it, every statement is an opinion, even encyclopedic writings are opinions from various points of view, although they may be more educated than the average person. The only trouble I see is in how to merge encyclopedia and user commentary. I'd love to see what others think about that! --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # Vandalism – but I don’t know what to do about that – perhaps the only way to stop it is to have a critical number of users<br /> #:I pretty much haven't had any vandalism at Wikible for a few months now. I use keyword filters, captchas, a username registration blacklist, and a user creation log to keep track of who registers. And I still allow anonymous users to edit and add content, and all registered users are free to edit the Main Page. In fact, the only page thta no one can edit but me is the Copyright notice, which I think is self-explanatory why I did that. Other than that, almost anyone can edit it. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The unwritten rule that an article about the local church down the road is not acceptable. What is wrong with writing an article about my church down the road and writing about its minister, congregation, teaching, music and service times? Nothing as far as I can see!<br /> #:I agree with that. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> #:Can you give some links to examples of where people have found this to be a problem? --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:47, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The layout is never particularly logical.<br /> #:Layout? What are you referring to? --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Thoughts from JJ===<br /> G. Grove, I've noticed your comments about inter-Christian wikis over the past several months,[http://www.wikible.org/en/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&amp;oldid=15783#Joining_together] so I know that there are at least three of us with similar concerns. Tom had actually started a ChristianWikis site to address these concerns, although it kind of fell through the cracks. I have expressed similar concerns on both Wikible ([http://www.wikible.org/en/index.php?title=User_talk:Admin&amp;oldid=15680#Wikipedia_and_Theopedia_collaboration Wikipedia and Theopedia collaboration]) and the BibleWiki ([http://bible.tmtm.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&amp;oldid=226363#Differentiating_BibleWiki_from_Wikipedia Differentiating BibleWiki from Wikipedia]), although I haven't gotten a chance to elaborate on the Christian-point-of-view problems that I've noticed from the beginning. For now, I've been content with concentrating my efforts on BibleWiki and Wikible (see my Theopedia link above for reasons why, as well as the [http://www.wikible.org/en/Wikible:About Wikible:About] page), but particularly on Wikipedia for general articles since there is a larger audience there. While the splintering of the Christian community is frustrating, I think it's also encouraging to know that a lot of people are competing to create the &quot;best&quot; Christian wiki; everyone has different web design skills, so some of the Christian wikis have better features than others&amp;mdash;survival of the fittest, if you will.<br /> <br /> Therefore, in terms of content, I think we're doing well; community, though, is indeed a problem. I haven't explored the options very much at this point, but Tom's ChristianWikis site idea was a good one; a site that concentrates on collaboration and community but completely leaves out the encyclopedic content. This community site would also be helpful for people to standardize wiki codes of conduct and syntax rules, as well as direct visitors to the sites with the most developed articles on certain topics. In this way, content would continue to be developed on the individual wikis since they all have different focuses. Another option is to try to center the inter-wiki discussion on one of the existing wikis, but make a clearly defined statement about the community being separate from the site's own faith-biased content.<br /> <br /> Please see my individual responses in Tom's section above, as well. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:34, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> I've been browsing around WikiChristian a little more, concentrating particularly on the site organization and layout. Graham, your ideas on this page present some major changes to WikiChristian! While I like your suggestions about making WikiChristian more '''testimony-oriented''', I think it presents a lot of challenges. To do this effectively, we really need to think carefully about how the site should be organized and make sure we have documentation on it. The current [[Wikichristian:Tutorial]] is very '''Wikipedia-oriented''', so people are going to need to understand that WikiChristian is very different from most neutral-point-of-view MediaWiki sites. Here are just a few initial things I've thought of. Please feel free to add commentary to them, similar to the way Tom has done it above.<br /> #WikiChristian could learn a lot from Wikipedia/Wikimedia formatting guidelines. See particularly the Organizing links at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents#For_editors - Right now, it seems like there are just a bunch of links everywhere, but no organization; the overdose of nav links (world churchs, bible dictionaries, etc.) is distracting, too.<br /> #Christian wikis are traditionally &quot;Wikipedia-oriented&quot; because it's hard to organize user-edited content if a lot of it is personal opinion/experience. We really need a good system of categories and/or list pages that would stay up-to-date as people add content.<br /> #Your topics on the [[Christianity]] page seem to be more like Portals in the Wikipedia-sense. Using &lt;code&gt;(overview)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;(G.G.)&lt;/code&gt; at the end of article titles seems odd to me. Again, I guess I would put those kinds of details in categories.<br /> <br /> My apologies for all the criticism. I'm just wanting to get the wiki well-oiled so visitors don't take test drives and end up crashing, if you know what I mean. Blessings to you... --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 20:22, 26 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> Since the Christianity Knowledge Base is open for anyone to edit, I've started a collaboration page to focus on these ideas. Graham, I'm not sure if this is what you're interested in, but it's worth mentioning: http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Christianity_Knowledge_Base:ChristianKM --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 13:49, 15 August 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Addressing the issue of brackets for &quot;(overview)&quot; or &quot;(user-name)&quot; etc.===<br /> <br /> Thanks J.J. for your comments. All your criticisms are welcome. Your points are good ones. I suppose my feeling is that portals and categories don't actually work that well. At least, I never really browse for my information by clicking through category or portal listings. Also, they are confusing to new users - at least they were to me when I first discovered wikis. I agree it is odd putting &quot;(overview)&quot; or &quot;(G.G.)&quot; after a title. The reason I've been doing that though is to make the article clear. If it has &quot;(G.G.)&quot; after it, then I mean that it is my original work and is an opinion. If it has &quot;(overview)&quot; after it then it means it is an encyclopedia, neutral point of view article. Also then that leaves room for &quot;(quotes)&quot; for any topic etc. For example, if you look at [[Church]] you'll see the main page is &quot;Church&quot; which has a brief summary and then the sub-links which incluide [[Church (overview)]] which hopefully would become the large encyclopedia style article but then there are also links for sub-topics and links for opinion articles such as [[What is the Church? (G.G.)]] and [[The Church (justforcatholics.org)]] as well as links for quotes about the church at [[Church (quotes)]] and a link for brief forum-style discussion about the church [[Church (discussion)]]. So although it is a little odd, I still think ultimately it allows for growth and personal articles. Let me know what you think. --[[User:Graham grove|Graham grove]] 21:42, 26 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> :One of the problems with the parenthesis in the title is that there are other non-topic pages that don't have parenthesis; I think it would get confusing as to what's a topic and what's an article/opinion.<br /> <br /> :How about a Topic: namespace instead of Portal? Also, instead of [[Template:Overview]] showing ''An overview of ''[[Church (overview)|Church]], it would probably be less confusing if it showed the actual link, like ''See [[Church (overview)]] for a more detailed article.'' [[Template:Opinions]] and [[Template:Quotes]] would be changed similarly. <br /> <br /> :I think this may work out well if we have a good how-to guide on making topic pages, maybe even using a [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Substitution subst] template to start from. I may make my own prototype at [[Talk:Christianity/Dev]] (with closer adherence to [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents#For_editors Wikimedia formatting standards]) if you think that would be helpful. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 19:11, 27 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ::Please centralize discussion related to my dev page at [[Wikichristian talk:Topics]]. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 11:10, 3 August 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Thoughts from Ben (CKB)===<br /> ''I'm copying this from the Christianity Knowledge Base since it brings up some more collaboration ideas. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 11:08, 10 August 2006 (PDT)''<br /> <br /> Here's another problem with Christian wikis: They're hosted on private sites, therefore there is no &quot;centrality&quot; to them. I think ''this'' wiki, since it's hosted by [[Wikipedia:Wikia|Wikia Inc.]], is more &quot;central&quot;. I think it might be good for this wiki to specialize in apologetics.<br /> <br /> What we could do is perhaps form some sort of ChristianWiki Foundation (sort of like the [[Wikipedia:MediaWiki Foundation|MediaWiki Foundation]]) and, under that heading, have a &quot;Christian Meta Wiki&quot;, which would work like [http://meta.wikimedia.org/ Meta-Wiki], and under that heading have different projects: One for encyclopedic articles, one for general Christian apologetics that links to wikis of different denominations to show what they think on different topics, one for an international church directory, one for Christian music of all kinds, and perhaps some other projects as well. New projects and/or the joining of existing projects would be discussed at the &quot;Meta-Wiki&quot;. If it was done this way, we wouldn't be modeled after Wikipedia, but after the foundation that started Wikipedia - so we'd have all of the advantages without the drawbacks, you see? --[http://rlds.wikia.com/wiki/User:BenMcLean BenMcLean] 13:54, 27 July 2006 (UTC)<br /> <br /> :I attempted to respond to this same letter and work with Graham at WikiChristian, but I wasn't getting any interest there; plus, the MediaWiki version there is grossly outdated, making it hard to work on. '''Ben''', I like your thoughts about a Christian Meta, but I think CKB could probably serve as this central hub. It is already on Wikia, providing a reliable server location. We could redesign this Community Portal (CP) (maybe even the Welcome page) to emphasize a &quot;Collaboration&quot; page (or set of pages, maybe featuring the Forum namespace). I don't think we would need a whole, separate, site just for collaboration purposes. This CP could also emphasize a separate CKB-only CP. I like your IRC idea below, too.<br /> <br /> :Also, in working on a [http://www.wikible.org/en/Wikible:Christian_wikis Christian wikis] chart over at Wikible, I noticed that CKB and ChristWiki have very different page counts (528 vs. 11911). Why would ChristWiki have so many more considering that it's a fork of CKB? Does Wikia calculate it differently? See my chart and footnote for more details. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 20:39, 7 August 2006 (UTC)<br /> <br /> ===Ideas of [[User:Denise|Denise]]===<br /> <br /> A few months ago I started my own multilangual Christian wiki project [http://jesus-wiki.org Jesus-Wiki]. But I've only just recently really started to work on it. At the beginning of September I finally noticed that there are other Christian wikis around. But because I've primarily been working on the German version of Jesus-Wiki, that shouldn't be a problem concerning the Christian wiki collaboration.<br /> <br /> As I've only just discovered that there's a discussion about Christian wiki collaboration, I don't really know what has been going on so far. So if I mention something that's already been said and discussed: I apologize for that.<br /> <br /> '''How I think Christian wiki collaboration should be'''<br /> <br /> I think there should be a multilangual wiki collaboration that is organized in a similar way as [http://wikipedia.org Wikipedia]. There should be one &quot;content wiki&quot; (a wiki with articles, etc.) for every language, plus one central Media Pool (or whatever you want to call it). It saves space and work (licensing, uploading, description, etc.). Maybe there could be another wiki with the purpose of organising the collaboration between the different languages. But the Media Pool could have that function. Of course there could be some specialized wikis (like [http://wikible Wikible] and [http://creationwiki.org CreationWiki]) that fill some special needs and concentrate on a specific aspect of Christianity. In general I think there should be a wiki system with general Christian topics written from a Christian point of view. As far as I know there have been [http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Christianity_Knowledge_Base_talk:Christian_point_of_view discussions] about what a Christian point of view should be. I haven't gotten involved in those yet.<br /> <br /> Why do I think there should be only one wiki per language?<br /> <br /> #It takes a lot of work to set up a wiki (organisation, structure, getting people involved, etc.)<br /> #We don't have enough people involved to be able to spare anybody. There should be as many people concentrated on one wiki as possible.<br /> #Overlapping articles also are a waste of time and work.<br /> #The whole purpose of Christian wikis should be to unify and create an overview of Christian ideas (and give more details too, of course). We don't all have to have exactly the same opinion, but at least we should find a way to work together. By creating varouns wikis for every set of ideas we would just be avoiding the whole problem and not solving it. If we don't work together, we don't need wikis. And if Wikipedia can do it we should be ashamed of ourselves if we, callins ourselves Christians (= one body!!!) and saying we're being guided by the Holy Spirit, don't manage to do at least as well.<br /> #If the wikis are organized well enough there shouldn't be any problems with being able to find the information we want. It's just a question of structure.<br /> #There should be even more reasons. Please feel free to add them here!<br /> <br /> I also think that the '''wikis should have certain things in common''', for example the Statement of Faith, the Aboutpage, the General disclaimers, the Privacy policy, etc. The General disclaimers and the Privacy policy could be based upon the ones of Wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer General disclaimer], [http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy Privacy policy]). Those articles deal with some problems of this world. So why not use a solution given by an organisation of this world as long as it doesn't conflict with God's word? Wikipedia must have a lot of experience with legal problems and I don't want to waste much of my time on law related stuff.<br /> <br /> There also is a domain problem. What URL should be used? I imagine that we all agree that the wiki system should use one main domain and subdomains. What domain will be used and what will happen to the other domains I do not know. I personally like the domain [http://jesus-wiki.org] because Jesus should be the center of it all. And of course there also is the Logo problem. But as soon as the domain problem is solved, it should be easer to choose a logo or even create a new one.<br /> <br /> At least somebody has suggested to host the wikis at [http://wikia.com Wikia]. I don't like that idea.<br /> <br /> #There are ads. Some of them might say exactly the opposite of what we believe.<br /> #There are other free Christian (!) hosting sites without ads. As far as I know, WikiChristian has it's own server. I am hosted at [http://project62.com Project62]. The host is extremely nice and I haven't noticed any server problems. All wikis could be hosted there.<br /> <br /> '''What to copy from Wikipedia'''<br /> <br /> I believe that the content on the wikis should be structured in a similar way as Wikipedia's. This includes the choice of software (-&gt; [http://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]). I don't know what extensions we'd want to install, though - if any at all. It looks more familiar to new users and makes them feel at home a lot faster if they are used to Wikipedia. And of course there just are certain articles (for example the editing help pages) that we can't edit without the help of Wikipedia or information from other wikis of [http://wikimedia.org Wikimedia]. But apart from that I wouldn't collaborate with Wikipedia. It is a secular wiki and has a lot of information that doesn't promote the Christian beliefs. And I would want the Christian wikis to be as independent as possible. There only should be links to Wikipedia pages if some information used on the Christian wikis was taken from there. I'd only mention Wikipedia if it's really necessary.<br /> <br /> '''The wiki structure and organisation'''<br /> <br /> The wikis should be structured and organized in an understandable way. If you take a look at the [http://de.jesus-wiki.org German version of Jesus-Wiki] you'll notice that I haven't even started writing real articles. I want to build a good foundation first. I haven't even uploaded pictures (the only exception is the wiki logo). If I am unsure about how I want to organize the content, why should I expect anybody new to Jesus-Wiki to find anything at all? That person doesn't have a clue whatsoever of what is around! And if there is a good structure, it is easier to add new content and find something to work on as well. I personally prefer working on organizing wikis rather than writing articles.<br /> <br /> Somebody mentioned that '''categories''' don't seem to work. I disagree. I believe that the Categories (would) work if they were/are used right from the beginning. It's work, ut it will pay off in the long run. It could be hard to start or try to fix an unstructured categorising system after a lot of content has been added.<br /> <br /> Another way of linking pages are '''templates''' with overviews. Take [http://de.jesus-wiki.org/wiki/Vorlage:Navigation_Namensräume Vorlage:Navigation Namensräume] and [http://de.jesus-wiki.org/wiki/Vorlage:Navigation Über Jesus-Wiki Vorlage:Navigation Über Jesus-Wiki] as examples. Wikipedia uses them too and I think they work. These templates look the same or at least very similar on every page you use them on. That keeps people from landing on the same page over and over again and goind in circles. If they click on a link of an overview template, it will be easier for them to find the samy information again and it will help them get an idea of how the wiki content is structured.<br /> <br /> We also have to think about how we want to '''organize the main pages''' of the wikis (Home page, Community page, Help page, Aboutspage etc.). Wikipedia seems to have problems keeping the information seperate. I personally don't like it if the same information can be found in various places. I want to be sure I've read all the information that's available on the topic I want. Some examples of how I would structure it:<br /> <br /> *The Home page should welcome people, give a general overview of what is available on the wiki and make it easy to get a feel for the wiki itself as fast as possible.<br /> *The Aboutspage should talk about the general ideas behind the wiki and be linked with the Statement of Faith, the General disclaimers, etc. I have done so on Jesus-Wiki.<br /> *The Community page should help make new users feel at home and give information about the community on the wiki. It should also contain information about what is going on, how you can get involved, help you find other users and make the communication between user easier.<br /> *The Help page only should contain technical help. For people that could be totally lost there also can be links to the other main pages.<br /> <br /> As far as I know the wikis will want to have at least one translation of the '''Bible''' within the wiki. I haven't really thought about how this could be done. I have seen some wikis have one page per verse. This could make it hard to see the verse in a bigger context, but it makes the linking of verses easier. I think it would be helpful to create a separate namespace &quot;Bible&quot;. This causes the linking to be a bit harder, but it makes it easier to look for something in the Bible because you can restrict the search to the namespace &quot;Bible&quot;.<br /> <br /> I've also seen that [http://wikible.org Wikible] uses the same '''usernames''' for all of its wikis. If it isn't too hard to set up such a system, I think it would make sense to do so. It makes it a lot easier to find the same person on different wikis.<br /> <br /> '''Building a community'''<br /> <br /> It is very important for a wiki to have a stable and growing community if it itself is supposed to grow. The Community page should be a easy starting point for that. There also should be something similar to the '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Babel Babel system of Wikipedia]''', although we should give it a different name because Babel is connected with too much negative aspects and it isn't just used for language purposes anymore (at least not on the German Wikipedia). It can be used to find people with certain abilities, interests, of certain locations, etc. Another possibility would be to build a '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trust_network Trust network]'''. Both systems could come in very handy and help us build an active community. By using those templates new users can also become familiar with using them and they can get experience in editing pages. I believe a user feels more comfortable editing his/her own page instead of editing the Sandbox page. But I could be wrong.<br /> <br /> We'll also have to talk about getting more people involved sooner or later. But all advertisement and promotion attempts can wait until the wiki system has been set up to a certain extent.<br /> <br /> Well, I hope this post isn't too long. I wanted to say everything I think is important at the moment and hope I've been successful at doing so. Please post your comments.<br /> <br /> - [[User:Denise|Denise]] 02:42, 18 September 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> I forgot at least one aspect:<br /> <br /> '''The content of the Christian wiki system'''<br /> <br /> I do agree that the Christian wikis should be more than just normal encyclopedias. You should be able to add information about specific churches, testimonies, etc. But this would have to be organised in a good way. Using 'overview' and 'quotes' in brackets seems to confusing to me. The 'overview' page should be the main page of the topic (without word added in brackets). From there you could use special navigation templates that look the same on every page with similar functions and lead to a subpage with the pagename 'main page/subpage topic'. That way it is clear that it is a subpage. I'd only use subpages if it's really necessary. Most information could be included on the main page. You could start a subpage as soon as the information gets very personal. In general I'm against creating subpages.<br /> <br /> - [[User:Denise|Denise]] 03:51, 18 September 2006 (PDT)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Talk:Christian_wikis&diff=70585 Talk:Christian wikis 2006-09-18T10:51:06Z <p>Denise: Edited Ideas of Denise, added another aspect</p> <hr /> <div>[[Talk:Christian wikis/Archive 1]]<br /> <br /> ==An open letter to users and administrators of the various different Christian wikis==<br /> <br /> Hello,<br /> <br /> Thanks for reading my two cents worth. As a bit of background information, my name is G. Grove and you can contact me at graham_grove@yahoo.com.au to discuss any of the following issues. I've been involved in Christian wikis for a while now. In fact, I first tried to set up a Christianity book in wikibooks 2 years ago, but then I discovered that there were three other Christian wikis at the time and I left the wikibook and joined WikiChristian. At the time there was also Compass and Theopedia, but not anything else. In an attempt to try and get WikiChristian used more I started the wikipedia article &quot;Christian wikis&quot; and have since watched an explosion of links appear. That there are all these people wanting to be involved in spreading the gospel and knowledge of Jesus and Christianity through wikis is a wonderful thing. I especially respect those users and administrators who acknowledge other Christian wiki sites as well as their own. Every one of these wikis has some excellent points. Theopedia is full of academic articles; wikible is intelligently set out; biblewiki is commendable for its extensive linking; wikiChristian is admirable because of its attempt to cover all things Christian including be a directory for all the churches of the world; and I could go on and on about each wiki.<br /> <br /> Despite all these wonderful qualities and the hearts behind them, I believe Christian wikis are failing in what I see as their two most important objectives in glorify God. Firstly, to be a body of knowledge where Christians actually come to learn about a topic, and to actively be involved in writing and updating articles; and secondly, to be a witness to non-Christians about what Christianity is all about. It is obvious to me that the wikis are not used by more than a couple people for each site, and that non-Christians are not reading them either. Why is this failure occurring?<br /> <br /> I believe there is one very important overriding fact that is stifling the use and growth of all of these wikis. They are all essentially modelled closely on Wikipedia. Why is this a problem? Well, wikipedia is a great encyclopedia – a fantastic reference and very useable and helpful. So, if I want to know about say, the “Coptic Orthodox Church” why would I go anywhere else?! I would only go anywhere else if that anywhere else presenting the information differently and allowed me to easily see what I was most interested in. I might for example be interested in knowing about the persecution of the Coptic church in Egypt today. To learn about that, I am going to want read testimonies about peoples experiences living in Egypt. I might want to know about the formation of the Coptic church. To learn about this, I am going to want to firstly read an encylopedia style overview article about the council of Chalcedon and monophysitism, but then I going to want to read different peoples views on interpreting these topics – their opinions are important because I know that there are many interpretations – there is not perhaps one “Christian viewpoint” for this. However, I might want to find a local Coptic church to visit – and so I would need a list or index of Coptic churches – their addresses and service times and what language they were in. Now Wikipedia wouldn’t be a particularly useful source for some of what I want and certainly isn’t set out in a way that it is easy to find some of that information. No, the wiki I am looking for would be different, however, it just doesn’t exist currently.<br /> <br /> There are also lots of other little factors that I believe stifle the growth of the various Christian wikis. These include<br /> <br /> # The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous<br /> # The complaints that seem to arise whenever someone writes an article in an essay style presenting his viewpoint, rather than in an encyclopedia style. Articles should be able to have sentences starting with “I think”. Now these are clearly individual opinion articles, and so need to be marked as such. But Christianity is a personal religion, and people have opinions which differ. “I think” is valid.<br /> # Vandalism – but I don’t know what to do about that – perhaps the only way to stop it is to have a critical number of users<br /> # The unwritten rule that an article about the local church down the road is not acceptable. What is wrong with writing an article about my church down the road and writing about its minister, congregation, teaching, music and service times? Nothing as far as I can see!<br /> # The layout is never particularly logical.<br /> <br /> There are I’m sure lots more issues that other people have thought of. And of course you may vehemently disagree with me on each or every point. I welcome comments. Please leave comments on WikiChristian's “Christian wikis” talk page (http://www.wikichristian.org/index.php/Talk:Christian_wikis) (so others can read them, or email me. I have been fiddling with ideas, templates and trialling out different formats for a Christian wiki that I believe would work – it would hopefully be acceptable to those who want an encyclopedia, those who want testimonies, those who want opinions and discussion, those who want stacks of information with directories of churches, lyrics of songs and public domain texts. Please take a look at [[Christianity]] for an example of what a template of one possible way this could be done. <br /> <br /> Thanks for your time. I think those of us who want a Christian wiki need some discussion, and perhaps we need to put together a larger group of people to work on one encompassing wiki rather than dozens of small wikis.<br /> <br /> Graham<br /> <br /> (--[[User:Graham grove|Graham grove]] 21:55, 24 July 2006 (PDT))<br /> <br /> ===Point-by-point responses from Tom===<br /> I appreciate the comments. I don't really disagree with any of it. I think some of the similarity with Wikipedia is an effort not to re-invent the wheel. For example, in the area of organization of the Wiki. Of course there are other aspects than just organizational and logistical things. In addition, we also need to remember that there are many people in the world that haven't even heard of Wikipedia, so it shouldn't be too surprising that Christian wikis are lacking in editorial support. Here are some responses to your points... --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous<br /> #:Interesting idea, I think I like it. Especially for citing articles. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> #:Some people prefer to remain anonymous. I, for example, don't mind using my first name on my signature, but I'd rather not advertise my last name to, literally, the whole world. Also, most people like &quot;unhelpful usernames&quot; because they can use the same one across different websites. I also think it's a good brain excercise for all of us to make the effort at associating a username with a person's real name (if the user even chooses to give it to us in the firstplace). --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:40, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The complaints that seem to arise whenever someone writes an article in an essay style presenting his viewpoint, rather than in an encyclopedia style. Articles should be able to have sentences starting with “I think”. Now these are clearly individual opinion articles, and so need to be marked as such. But Christianity is a personal religion, and people have opinions which differ. “I think” is valid.<br /> #:I agree. &quot;I&quot; statements should be included somehow. If you think about it, every statement is an opinion, even encyclopedic writings are opinions from various points of view, although they may be more educated than the average person. The only trouble I see is in how to merge encyclopedia and user commentary. I'd love to see what others think about that! --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # Vandalism – but I don’t know what to do about that – perhaps the only way to stop it is to have a critical number of users<br /> #:I pretty much haven't had any vandalism at Wikible for a few months now. I use keyword filters, captchas, a username registration blacklist, and a user creation log to keep track of who registers. And I still allow anonymous users to edit and add content, and all registered users are free to edit the Main Page. In fact, the only page thta no one can edit but me is the Copyright notice, which I think is self-explanatory why I did that. Other than that, almost anyone can edit it. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The unwritten rule that an article about the local church down the road is not acceptable. What is wrong with writing an article about my church down the road and writing about its minister, congregation, teaching, music and service times? Nothing as far as I can see!<br /> #:I agree with that. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> #:Can you give some links to examples of where people have found this to be a problem? --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:47, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The layout is never particularly logical.<br /> #:Layout? What are you referring to? --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Thoughts from JJ===<br /> G. Grove, I've noticed your comments about inter-Christian wikis over the past several months,[http://www.wikible.org/en/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&amp;oldid=15783#Joining_together] so I know that there are at least three of us with similar concerns. Tom had actually started a ChristianWikis site to address these concerns, although it kind of fell through the cracks. I have expressed similar concerns on both Wikible ([http://www.wikible.org/en/index.php?title=User_talk:Admin&amp;oldid=15680#Wikipedia_and_Theopedia_collaboration Wikipedia and Theopedia collaboration]) and the BibleWiki ([http://bible.tmtm.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&amp;oldid=226363#Differentiating_BibleWiki_from_Wikipedia Differentiating BibleWiki from Wikipedia]), although I haven't gotten a chance to elaborate on the Christian-point-of-view problems that I've noticed from the beginning. For now, I've been content with concentrating my efforts on BibleWiki and Wikible (see my Theopedia link above for reasons why, as well as the [http://www.wikible.org/en/Wikible:About Wikible:About] page), but particularly on Wikipedia for general articles since there is a larger audience there. While the splintering of the Christian community is frustrating, I think it's also encouraging to know that a lot of people are competing to create the &quot;best&quot; Christian wiki; everyone has different web design skills, so some of the Christian wikis have better features than others&amp;mdash;survival of the fittest, if you will.<br /> <br /> Therefore, in terms of content, I think we're doing well; community, though, is indeed a problem. I haven't explored the options very much at this point, but Tom's ChristianWikis site idea was a good one; a site that concentrates on collaboration and community but completely leaves out the encyclopedic content. This community site would also be helpful for people to standardize wiki codes of conduct and syntax rules, as well as direct visitors to the sites with the most developed articles on certain topics. In this way, content would continue to be developed on the individual wikis since they all have different focuses. Another option is to try to center the inter-wiki discussion on one of the existing wikis, but make a clearly defined statement about the community being separate from the site's own faith-biased content.<br /> <br /> Please see my individual responses in Tom's section above, as well. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:34, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> I've been browsing around WikiChristian a little more, concentrating particularly on the site organization and layout. Graham, your ideas on this page present some major changes to WikiChristian! While I like your suggestions about making WikiChristian more '''testimony-oriented''', I think it presents a lot of challenges. To do this effectively, we really need to think carefully about how the site should be organized and make sure we have documentation on it. The current [[Wikichristian:Tutorial]] is very '''Wikipedia-oriented''', so people are going to need to understand that WikiChristian is very different from most neutral-point-of-view MediaWiki sites. Here are just a few initial things I've thought of. Please feel free to add commentary to them, similar to the way Tom has done it above.<br /> #WikiChristian could learn a lot from Wikipedia/Wikimedia formatting guidelines. See particularly the Organizing links at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents#For_editors - Right now, it seems like there are just a bunch of links everywhere, but no organization; the overdose of nav links (world churchs, bible dictionaries, etc.) is distracting, too.<br /> #Christian wikis are traditionally &quot;Wikipedia-oriented&quot; because it's hard to organize user-edited content if a lot of it is personal opinion/experience. We really need a good system of categories and/or list pages that would stay up-to-date as people add content.<br /> #Your topics on the [[Christianity]] page seem to be more like Portals in the Wikipedia-sense. Using &lt;code&gt;(overview)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;(G.G.)&lt;/code&gt; at the end of article titles seems odd to me. Again, I guess I would put those kinds of details in categories.<br /> <br /> My apologies for all the criticism. I'm just wanting to get the wiki well-oiled so visitors don't take test drives and end up crashing, if you know what I mean. Blessings to you... --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 20:22, 26 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> Since the Christianity Knowledge Base is open for anyone to edit, I've started a collaboration page to focus on these ideas. Graham, I'm not sure if this is what you're interested in, but it's worth mentioning: http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Christianity_Knowledge_Base:ChristianKM --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 13:49, 15 August 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Addressing the issue of brackets for &quot;(overview)&quot; or &quot;(user-name)&quot; etc.===<br /> <br /> Thanks J.J. for your comments. All your criticisms are welcome. Your points are good ones. I suppose my feeling is that portals and categories don't actually work that well. At least, I never really browse for my information by clicking through category or portal listings. Also, they are confusing to new users - at least they were to me when I first discovered wikis. I agree it is odd putting &quot;(overview)&quot; or &quot;(G.G.)&quot; after a title. The reason I've been doing that though is to make the article clear. If it has &quot;(G.G.)&quot; after it, then I mean that it is my original work and is an opinion. If it has &quot;(overview)&quot; after it then it means it is an encyclopedia, neutral point of view article. Also then that leaves room for &quot;(quotes)&quot; for any topic etc. For example, if you look at [[Church]] you'll see the main page is &quot;Church&quot; which has a brief summary and then the sub-links which incluide [[Church (overview)]] which hopefully would become the large encyclopedia style article but then there are also links for sub-topics and links for opinion articles such as [[What is the Church? (G.G.)]] and [[The Church (justforcatholics.org)]] as well as links for quotes about the church at [[Church (quotes)]] and a link for brief forum-style discussion about the church [[Church (discussion)]]. So although it is a little odd, I still think ultimately it allows for growth and personal articles. Let me know what you think. --[[User:Graham grove|Graham grove]] 21:42, 26 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> :One of the problems with the parenthesis in the title is that there are other non-topic pages that don't have parenthesis; I think it would get confusing as to what's a topic and what's an article/opinion.<br /> <br /> :How about a Topic: namespace instead of Portal? Also, instead of [[Template:Overview]] showing ''An overview of ''[[Church (overview)|Church]], it would probably be less confusing if it showed the actual link, like ''See [[Church (overview)]] for a more detailed article.'' [[Template:Opinions]] and [[Template:Quotes]] would be changed similarly. <br /> <br /> :I think this may work out well if we have a good how-to guide on making topic pages, maybe even using a [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Substitution subst] template to start from. I may make my own prototype at [[Talk:Christianity/Dev]] (with closer adherence to [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents#For_editors Wikimedia formatting standards]) if you think that would be helpful. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 19:11, 27 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ::Please centralize discussion related to my dev page at [[Wikichristian talk:Topics]]. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 11:10, 3 August 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Thoughts from Ben (CKB)===<br /> ''I'm copying this from the Christianity Knowledge Base since it brings up some more collaboration ideas. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 11:08, 10 August 2006 (PDT)''<br /> <br /> Here's another problem with Christian wikis: They're hosted on private sites, therefore there is no &quot;centrality&quot; to them. I think ''this'' wiki, since it's hosted by [[Wikipedia:Wikia|Wikia Inc.]], is more &quot;central&quot;. I think it might be good for this wiki to specialize in apologetics.<br /> <br /> What we could do is perhaps form some sort of ChristianWiki Foundation (sort of like the [[Wikipedia:MediaWiki Foundation|MediaWiki Foundation]]) and, under that heading, have a &quot;Christian Meta Wiki&quot;, which would work like [http://meta.wikimedia.org/ Meta-Wiki], and under that heading have different projects: One for encyclopedic articles, one for general Christian apologetics that links to wikis of different denominations to show what they think on different topics, one for an international church directory, one for Christian music of all kinds, and perhaps some other projects as well. New projects and/or the joining of existing projects would be discussed at the &quot;Meta-Wiki&quot;. If it was done this way, we wouldn't be modeled after Wikipedia, but after the foundation that started Wikipedia - so we'd have all of the advantages without the drawbacks, you see? --[http://rlds.wikia.com/wiki/User:BenMcLean BenMcLean] 13:54, 27 July 2006 (UTC)<br /> <br /> :I attempted to respond to this same letter and work with Graham at WikiChristian, but I wasn't getting any interest there; plus, the MediaWiki version there is grossly outdated, making it hard to work on. '''Ben''', I like your thoughts about a Christian Meta, but I think CKB could probably serve as this central hub. It is already on Wikia, providing a reliable server location. We could redesign this Community Portal (CP) (maybe even the Welcome page) to emphasize a &quot;Collaboration&quot; page (or set of pages, maybe featuring the Forum namespace). I don't think we would need a whole, separate, site just for collaboration purposes. This CP could also emphasize a separate CKB-only CP. I like your IRC idea below, too.<br /> <br /> :Also, in working on a [http://www.wikible.org/en/Wikible:Christian_wikis Christian wikis] chart over at Wikible, I noticed that CKB and ChristWiki have very different page counts (528 vs. 11911). Why would ChristWiki have so many more considering that it's a fork of CKB? Does Wikia calculate it differently? See my chart and footnote for more details. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 20:39, 7 August 2006 (UTC)<br /> <br /> ===Ideas of [[User:Denise|Denise]]===<br /> <br /> A few months ago I started my own multilangual Christian wiki project [http://jesus-wiki.org Jesus-Wiki]. But I've only just recently really started to work on it. At the beginning of September I finally noticed that there are other Christian wikis around. But because I've primarily been working on the German version of Jesus-Wiki, that shouldn't be a problem concerning the Christian wiki collaboration.<br /> <br /> As I've only just discovered that there's a discussion about Christian wiki collaboration, I don't really know what has been going on so far. So if I mention something that's already been said and discussed: I apologize for that.<br /> <br /> '''How I think Christian wiki collaboration should be'''<br /> <br /> I think there should be a multilangual wiki collaboration that is organized in a similar way as [http://wikipedia.org Wikipedia]. There should be one &quot;content wiki&quot; (a wiki with articles, etc.) for every language, plus one central Media Pool (or whatever you want to call it). It saves space and work (licensing, uploading, description, etc.). Maybe there could be another wiki with the purpose of organising the collaboration between the different languages. But the Media Pool could have that function. Of course there could be some specialized wikis (like [http://wikible Wikible] and [http://creationwiki.org CreationWiki]) that fill some special needs and concentrate on a specific aspect of Christianity. In general I think there should be a wiki system with general Christian topics written from a Christian point of view. As far as I know there have been [http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Christianity_Knowledge_Base_talk:Christian_point_of_view discussions] about what a Christian point of view should be. I haven't gotten involved in those yet.<br /> <br /> Why do I think there should be only one wiki per language?<br /> <br /> #It takes a lot of work to set up a wiki (organisation, structure, getting people involved, etc.)<br /> #We don't have enough people involved to be able to spare anybody. There should be as many people concentrated on one wiki as possible.<br /> #Overlapping articles also are a waste of time and work.<br /> #The whole purpose of Christian wikis should be to unify and create an overview of Christian ideas (and give more details too, of course). We don't all have to have exactly the same opinion, but at least we should find a way to work together. By creating varouns wikis for every set of ideas we would just be avoiding the whole problem and not solving it. If we don't work together, we don't need wikis. And if Wikipedia can do it we should be ashamed of ourselves if we, callins ourselves Christians (= one body!!!) and saying we're being guided by the Holy Spirit, don't manage to do at least as well.<br /> #If the wikis are organized well enough there shouldn't be any problems with being able to find the information we want. It's just a question of structure.<br /> #There should be even more reasons. Please feel free to add them here!<br /> <br /> I also think that the '''wikis should have certain things in common''', for example the Statement of Faith, the Aboutpage, the General disclaimers, the Privacy policy, etc. The General disclaimers and the Privacy policy could be based upon the ones of Wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer General disclaimer], [http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy Privacy policy]). Those articles deal with some problems of this world. So why not use a solution given by an organisation of this world as long as it doesn't conflict with God's word? Wikipedia must have a lot of experience with legal problems and I don't want to waste much of my time on law related stuff.<br /> <br /> There also is a domain problem. What URL should be used? I imagine that we all agree that the wiki system should use one main domain and subdomains. What domain will be used and what will happen to the other domains I do not know. I personally like the domain [http://jesus-wiki.org] because Jesus should be the center of it all. And of course there also is the Logo problem. But as soon as the domain problem is solved, it should be easer to choose a logo or even create a new one.<br /> <br /> At least somebody has suggested to host the wikis at [http://wikia.com Wikia]. I don't like that idea.<br /> <br /> #There are ads. Some of them might say exactly the opposite of what we believe.<br /> #There are other free Christian (!) hosting sites without ads. As far as I know, WikiChristian has it's own server. I am hosted at [http://project62.com Project62]. The host is extremely nice and I haven't noticed any server problems. All wikis could be hosted there.<br /> <br /> '''What to copy from Wikipedia'''<br /> <br /> I believe that the content on the wikis should be structured in a similar way as Wikipedia's. This includes the choice of software (-&gt; [http://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]). I don't know what extensions we'd want to install, though - if any at all. It looks more familiar to new users and makes them feel at home a lot faster if they are used to Wikipedia. And of course there just are certain articles (for example the editing help pages) that we can't edit without the help of Wikipedia or information from other wikis of [http://wikimedia.org Wikimedia]. But apart from that I wouldn't collaborate with Wikipedia. It is a secular wiki and has a lot of information that doesn't promote the Christian beliefs. And I would want the Christian wikis to be as independent as possible. There only should be links to Wikipedia pages if some information used on the Christian wikis was taken from there. I'd only mention Wikipedia if it's really necessary.<br /> <br /> '''The wiki structure and organisation'''<br /> <br /> The wikis should be structured and organized in an understandable way. If you take a look at the [http://de.jesus-wiki.org German version of Jesus-Wiki] you'll notice that I haven't even started writing real articles. I want to build a good foundation first. I haven't even uploaded pictures (the only exception is the wiki logo). If I am unsure about how I want to organize the content, why should I expect anybody new to Jesus-Wiki to find anything at all? That person doesn't have a clue whatsoever of what is around! And if there is a good structure, it is easier to add new content and find something to work on as well. I personally prefer working on organizing wikis rather than writing articles.<br /> <br /> Somebody mentioned that '''categories''' don't seem to work. I disagree. I believe that the Categories (would) work if they were/are used right from the beginning. It's work, ut it will pay off in the long run. It could be hard to start or try to fix an unstructured categorising system after a lot of content has been added.<br /> <br /> Another way of linking pages are '''templates''' with overviews. Take [http://de.jesus-wiki.org/wiki/Vorlage:Navigation_Namensräume Vorlage:Navigation Namensräume] and [http://de.jesus-wiki.org/wiki/Vorlage:Navigation Über Jesus-Wiki Vorlage:Navigation Über Jesus-Wiki] as examples. Wikipedia uses them too and I think they work. These templates look the same or at least very similar on every page you use them on. That keeps people from landing on the same page over and over again and goind in circles. If they click on a link of an overview template, it will be easier for them to find the samy information again and it will help them get an idea of how the wiki content is structured.<br /> <br /> We also have to think about how we want to '''organize the main pages''' of the wikis (Home page, Community page, Help page, Aboutspage etc.). Wikipedia seems to have problems keeping the information seperate. I personally don't like it if the same information can be found in various places. I want to be sure I've read all the information that's available on the topic I want. Some examples of how I would structure it:<br /> <br /> *The Home page should welcome people, give a general overview of what is available on the wiki and make it easy to get a feel for the wiki itself as fast as possible.<br /> *The Aboutspage should talk about the general ideas behind the wiki and be linked with the Statement of Faith, the General disclaimers, etc. I have done so on Jesus-Wiki.<br /> *The Community page should help make new users feel at home and give information about the community on the wiki. It should also contain information about what is going on, how you can get involved, help you find other users and make the communication between user easier.<br /> *The Help page only should contain technical help. For people that could be totally lost there also can be links to the other main pages.<br /> <br /> As far as I know the wikis will want to have at least one translation of the '''Bible''' within the wiki. I haven't really thought about how this could be done. I have seen some wikis have one page per verse. This could make it hard to see the verse in a bigger context, but it makes the linking of verses easier. I think it would be helpful to create a separate namespace &quot;Bible&quot;. This causes the linking to be a bit harder, but it makes it easier to look for something in the Bible because you can restrict the search to the namespace &quot;Bible&quot;.<br /> <br /> I've also seen that [http://wikible.org Wikible] uses the same '''usernames''' for all of its wikis. If it isn't too hard to set up such a system, I think it would make sense to do so. It makes it a lot easier to find the same person on different wikis.<br /> <br /> '''Building a community'''<br /> <br /> It is very important for a wiki to have a stable and growing community if it itself is supposed to grow. The Community page should be a easy starting point for that. There also should be something similar to the '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Babel Babel system of Wikipedia]''', although we should give it a different name because Babel is connected with too much negative aspects and it isn't just used for language purposes anymore (at least not on the German Wikipedia). It can be used to find people with certain abilities, interests, of certain locations, etc. Another possibility would be to build a '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trust_network Trust network]'''. Both systems could come in very handy and help us build an active community. By using those templates new users can also become familiar with using them and they can get experience in editing pages. I believe a user feels more comfortable editing his/her own page instead of editing the Sandbox page. But I could be wrong.<br /> <br /> We'll also have to talk about getting more people involved sooner or later. But all advertisement and promotion attempts can wait until the wiki system has been set up to a certain extent.<br /> <br /> Well, I hope this post isn't too long. I wanted to say everything I think is important at the moment and hope I've been successful at doing so. Please post your comments.<br /> <br /> - [[User:Denise|Denise]] 02:42, 18 September 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> I forgot at least one aspect:<br /> <br /> '''The content of the Christian wiki system'''<br /> I do agree that the Christian wikis should be more than just normal encyclopedias. You should be able to add information about specific churches, testimonies, etc. But this would have to be organised in a good way. Using 'overview' and 'quotes' in brackets seems to confusing to me. The 'overview' page should be the main page of the topic (without word added in brackets). From there you could use special navigation templates that look the same on every page with similar functions and lead to a subpage with the pagename 'main page/subpage topic'. That way it is clear that it is a subpage. I'd only use subpages if it's really necessary. Most information could be included on the main page. You could start a subpage as soon as the information gets very personal. In general I'm against creating subpages.<br /> <br /> - [[User:Denise|Denise]] 03:51, 18 September 2006 (PDT)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Talk:Christian_wikis&diff=70584 Talk:Christian wikis 2006-09-18T09:42:44Z <p>Denise: I added &quot;Ideas of Denise&quot;</p> <hr /> <div>[[Talk:Christian wikis/Archive 1]]<br /> <br /> ==An open letter to users and administrators of the various different Christian wikis==<br /> <br /> Hello,<br /> <br /> Thanks for reading my two cents worth. As a bit of background information, my name is G. Grove and you can contact me at graham_grove@yahoo.com.au to discuss any of the following issues. I've been involved in Christian wikis for a while now. In fact, I first tried to set up a Christianity book in wikibooks 2 years ago, but then I discovered that there were three other Christian wikis at the time and I left the wikibook and joined WikiChristian. At the time there was also Compass and Theopedia, but not anything else. In an attempt to try and get WikiChristian used more I started the wikipedia article &quot;Christian wikis&quot; and have since watched an explosion of links appear. That there are all these people wanting to be involved in spreading the gospel and knowledge of Jesus and Christianity through wikis is a wonderful thing. I especially respect those users and administrators who acknowledge other Christian wiki sites as well as their own. Every one of these wikis has some excellent points. Theopedia is full of academic articles; wikible is intelligently set out; biblewiki is commendable for its extensive linking; wikiChristian is admirable because of its attempt to cover all things Christian including be a directory for all the churches of the world; and I could go on and on about each wiki.<br /> <br /> Despite all these wonderful qualities and the hearts behind them, I believe Christian wikis are failing in what I see as their two most important objectives in glorify God. Firstly, to be a body of knowledge where Christians actually come to learn about a topic, and to actively be involved in writing and updating articles; and secondly, to be a witness to non-Christians about what Christianity is all about. It is obvious to me that the wikis are not used by more than a couple people for each site, and that non-Christians are not reading them either. Why is this failure occurring?<br /> <br /> I believe there is one very important overriding fact that is stifling the use and growth of all of these wikis. They are all essentially modelled closely on Wikipedia. Why is this a problem? Well, wikipedia is a great encyclopedia – a fantastic reference and very useable and helpful. So, if I want to know about say, the “Coptic Orthodox Church” why would I go anywhere else?! I would only go anywhere else if that anywhere else presenting the information differently and allowed me to easily see what I was most interested in. I might for example be interested in knowing about the persecution of the Coptic church in Egypt today. To learn about that, I am going to want read testimonies about peoples experiences living in Egypt. I might want to know about the formation of the Coptic church. To learn about this, I am going to want to firstly read an encylopedia style overview article about the council of Chalcedon and monophysitism, but then I going to want to read different peoples views on interpreting these topics – their opinions are important because I know that there are many interpretations – there is not perhaps one “Christian viewpoint” for this. However, I might want to find a local Coptic church to visit – and so I would need a list or index of Coptic churches – their addresses and service times and what language they were in. Now Wikipedia wouldn’t be a particularly useful source for some of what I want and certainly isn’t set out in a way that it is easy to find some of that information. No, the wiki I am looking for would be different, however, it just doesn’t exist currently.<br /> <br /> There are also lots of other little factors that I believe stifle the growth of the various Christian wikis. These include<br /> <br /> # The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous<br /> # The complaints that seem to arise whenever someone writes an article in an essay style presenting his viewpoint, rather than in an encyclopedia style. Articles should be able to have sentences starting with “I think”. Now these are clearly individual opinion articles, and so need to be marked as such. But Christianity is a personal religion, and people have opinions which differ. “I think” is valid.<br /> # Vandalism – but I don’t know what to do about that – perhaps the only way to stop it is to have a critical number of users<br /> # The unwritten rule that an article about the local church down the road is not acceptable. What is wrong with writing an article about my church down the road and writing about its minister, congregation, teaching, music and service times? Nothing as far as I can see!<br /> # The layout is never particularly logical.<br /> <br /> There are I’m sure lots more issues that other people have thought of. And of course you may vehemently disagree with me on each or every point. I welcome comments. Please leave comments on WikiChristian's “Christian wikis” talk page (http://www.wikichristian.org/index.php/Talk:Christian_wikis) (so others can read them, or email me. I have been fiddling with ideas, templates and trialling out different formats for a Christian wiki that I believe would work – it would hopefully be acceptable to those who want an encyclopedia, those who want testimonies, those who want opinions and discussion, those who want stacks of information with directories of churches, lyrics of songs and public domain texts. Please take a look at [[Christianity]] for an example of what a template of one possible way this could be done. <br /> <br /> Thanks for your time. I think those of us who want a Christian wiki need some discussion, and perhaps we need to put together a larger group of people to work on one encompassing wiki rather than dozens of small wikis.<br /> <br /> Graham<br /> <br /> (--[[User:Graham grove|Graham grove]] 21:55, 24 July 2006 (PDT))<br /> <br /> ===Point-by-point responses from Tom===<br /> I appreciate the comments. I don't really disagree with any of it. I think some of the similarity with Wikipedia is an effort not to re-invent the wheel. For example, in the area of organization of the Wiki. Of course there are other aspects than just organizational and logistical things. In addition, we also need to remember that there are many people in the world that haven't even heard of Wikipedia, so it shouldn't be too surprising that Christian wikis are lacking in editorial support. Here are some responses to your points... --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous<br /> #:Interesting idea, I think I like it. Especially for citing articles. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> #:Some people prefer to remain anonymous. I, for example, don't mind using my first name on my signature, but I'd rather not advertise my last name to, literally, the whole world. Also, most people like &quot;unhelpful usernames&quot; because they can use the same one across different websites. I also think it's a good brain excercise for all of us to make the effort at associating a username with a person's real name (if the user even chooses to give it to us in the firstplace). --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:40, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The complaints that seem to arise whenever someone writes an article in an essay style presenting his viewpoint, rather than in an encyclopedia style. Articles should be able to have sentences starting with “I think”. Now these are clearly individual opinion articles, and so need to be marked as such. But Christianity is a personal religion, and people have opinions which differ. “I think” is valid.<br /> #:I agree. &quot;I&quot; statements should be included somehow. If you think about it, every statement is an opinion, even encyclopedic writings are opinions from various points of view, although they may be more educated than the average person. The only trouble I see is in how to merge encyclopedia and user commentary. I'd love to see what others think about that! --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # Vandalism – but I don’t know what to do about that – perhaps the only way to stop it is to have a critical number of users<br /> #:I pretty much haven't had any vandalism at Wikible for a few months now. I use keyword filters, captchas, a username registration blacklist, and a user creation log to keep track of who registers. And I still allow anonymous users to edit and add content, and all registered users are free to edit the Main Page. In fact, the only page thta no one can edit but me is the Copyright notice, which I think is self-explanatory why I did that. Other than that, almost anyone can edit it. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The unwritten rule that an article about the local church down the road is not acceptable. What is wrong with writing an article about my church down the road and writing about its minister, congregation, teaching, music and service times? Nothing as far as I can see!<br /> #:I agree with that. --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> #:Can you give some links to examples of where people have found this to be a problem? --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:47, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> # The layout is never particularly logical.<br /> #:Layout? What are you referring to? --[[User:Ymmotrojam|Tom]] 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Thoughts from JJ===<br /> G. Grove, I've noticed your comments about inter-Christian wikis over the past several months,[http://www.wikible.org/en/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&amp;oldid=15783#Joining_together] so I know that there are at least three of us with similar concerns. Tom had actually started a ChristianWikis site to address these concerns, although it kind of fell through the cracks. I have expressed similar concerns on both Wikible ([http://www.wikible.org/en/index.php?title=User_talk:Admin&amp;oldid=15680#Wikipedia_and_Theopedia_collaboration Wikipedia and Theopedia collaboration]) and the BibleWiki ([http://bible.tmtm.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&amp;oldid=226363#Differentiating_BibleWiki_from_Wikipedia Differentiating BibleWiki from Wikipedia]), although I haven't gotten a chance to elaborate on the Christian-point-of-view problems that I've noticed from the beginning. For now, I've been content with concentrating my efforts on BibleWiki and Wikible (see my Theopedia link above for reasons why, as well as the [http://www.wikible.org/en/Wikible:About Wikible:About] page), but particularly on Wikipedia for general articles since there is a larger audience there. While the splintering of the Christian community is frustrating, I think it's also encouraging to know that a lot of people are competing to create the &quot;best&quot; Christian wiki; everyone has different web design skills, so some of the Christian wikis have better features than others&amp;mdash;survival of the fittest, if you will.<br /> <br /> Therefore, in terms of content, I think we're doing well; community, though, is indeed a problem. I haven't explored the options very much at this point, but Tom's ChristianWikis site idea was a good one; a site that concentrates on collaboration and community but completely leaves out the encyclopedic content. This community site would also be helpful for people to standardize wiki codes of conduct and syntax rules, as well as direct visitors to the sites with the most developed articles on certain topics. In this way, content would continue to be developed on the individual wikis since they all have different focuses. Another option is to try to center the inter-wiki discussion on one of the existing wikis, but make a clearly defined statement about the community being separate from the site's own faith-biased content.<br /> <br /> Please see my individual responses in Tom's section above, as well. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 16:34, 25 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> I've been browsing around WikiChristian a little more, concentrating particularly on the site organization and layout. Graham, your ideas on this page present some major changes to WikiChristian! While I like your suggestions about making WikiChristian more '''testimony-oriented''', I think it presents a lot of challenges. To do this effectively, we really need to think carefully about how the site should be organized and make sure we have documentation on it. The current [[Wikichristian:Tutorial]] is very '''Wikipedia-oriented''', so people are going to need to understand that WikiChristian is very different from most neutral-point-of-view MediaWiki sites. Here are just a few initial things I've thought of. Please feel free to add commentary to them, similar to the way Tom has done it above.<br /> #WikiChristian could learn a lot from Wikipedia/Wikimedia formatting guidelines. See particularly the Organizing links at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents#For_editors - Right now, it seems like there are just a bunch of links everywhere, but no organization; the overdose of nav links (world churchs, bible dictionaries, etc.) is distracting, too.<br /> #Christian wikis are traditionally &quot;Wikipedia-oriented&quot; because it's hard to organize user-edited content if a lot of it is personal opinion/experience. We really need a good system of categories and/or list pages that would stay up-to-date as people add content.<br /> #Your topics on the [[Christianity]] page seem to be more like Portals in the Wikipedia-sense. Using &lt;code&gt;(overview)&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;(G.G.)&lt;/code&gt; at the end of article titles seems odd to me. Again, I guess I would put those kinds of details in categories.<br /> <br /> My apologies for all the criticism. I'm just wanting to get the wiki well-oiled so visitors don't take test drives and end up crashing, if you know what I mean. Blessings to you... --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 20:22, 26 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> Since the Christianity Knowledge Base is open for anyone to edit, I've started a collaboration page to focus on these ideas. Graham, I'm not sure if this is what you're interested in, but it's worth mentioning: http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Christianity_Knowledge_Base:ChristianKM --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 13:49, 15 August 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Addressing the issue of brackets for &quot;(overview)&quot; or &quot;(user-name)&quot; etc.===<br /> <br /> Thanks J.J. for your comments. All your criticisms are welcome. Your points are good ones. I suppose my feeling is that portals and categories don't actually work that well. At least, I never really browse for my information by clicking through category or portal listings. Also, they are confusing to new users - at least they were to me when I first discovered wikis. I agree it is odd putting &quot;(overview)&quot; or &quot;(G.G.)&quot; after a title. The reason I've been doing that though is to make the article clear. If it has &quot;(G.G.)&quot; after it, then I mean that it is my original work and is an opinion. If it has &quot;(overview)&quot; after it then it means it is an encyclopedia, neutral point of view article. Also then that leaves room for &quot;(quotes)&quot; for any topic etc. For example, if you look at [[Church]] you'll see the main page is &quot;Church&quot; which has a brief summary and then the sub-links which incluide [[Church (overview)]] which hopefully would become the large encyclopedia style article but then there are also links for sub-topics and links for opinion articles such as [[What is the Church? (G.G.)]] and [[The Church (justforcatholics.org)]] as well as links for quotes about the church at [[Church (quotes)]] and a link for brief forum-style discussion about the church [[Church (discussion)]]. So although it is a little odd, I still think ultimately it allows for growth and personal articles. Let me know what you think. --[[User:Graham grove|Graham grove]] 21:42, 26 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> :One of the problems with the parenthesis in the title is that there are other non-topic pages that don't have parenthesis; I think it would get confusing as to what's a topic and what's an article/opinion.<br /> <br /> :How about a Topic: namespace instead of Portal? Also, instead of [[Template:Overview]] showing ''An overview of ''[[Church (overview)|Church]], it would probably be less confusing if it showed the actual link, like ''See [[Church (overview)]] for a more detailed article.'' [[Template:Opinions]] and [[Template:Quotes]] would be changed similarly. <br /> <br /> :I think this may work out well if we have a good how-to guide on making topic pages, maybe even using a [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Substitution subst] template to start from. I may make my own prototype at [[Talk:Christianity/Dev]] (with closer adherence to [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents#For_editors Wikimedia formatting standards]) if you think that would be helpful. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 19:11, 27 July 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ::Please centralize discussion related to my dev page at [[Wikichristian talk:Topics]]. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 11:10, 3 August 2006 (PDT)<br /> <br /> ===Thoughts from Ben (CKB)===<br /> ''I'm copying this from the Christianity Knowledge Base since it brings up some more collaboration ideas. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 11:08, 10 August 2006 (PDT)''<br /> <br /> Here's another problem with Christian wikis: They're hosted on private sites, therefore there is no &quot;centrality&quot; to them. I think ''this'' wiki, since it's hosted by [[Wikipedia:Wikia|Wikia Inc.]], is more &quot;central&quot;. I think it might be good for this wiki to specialize in apologetics.<br /> <br /> What we could do is perhaps form some sort of ChristianWiki Foundation (sort of like the [[Wikipedia:MediaWiki Foundation|MediaWiki Foundation]]) and, under that heading, have a &quot;Christian Meta Wiki&quot;, which would work like [http://meta.wikimedia.org/ Meta-Wiki], and under that heading have different projects: One for encyclopedic articles, one for general Christian apologetics that links to wikis of different denominations to show what they think on different topics, one for an international church directory, one for Christian music of all kinds, and perhaps some other projects as well. New projects and/or the joining of existing projects would be discussed at the &quot;Meta-Wiki&quot;. If it was done this way, we wouldn't be modeled after Wikipedia, but after the foundation that started Wikipedia - so we'd have all of the advantages without the drawbacks, you see? --[http://rlds.wikia.com/wiki/User:BenMcLean BenMcLean] 13:54, 27 July 2006 (UTC)<br /> <br /> :I attempted to respond to this same letter and work with Graham at WikiChristian, but I wasn't getting any interest there; plus, the MediaWiki version there is grossly outdated, making it hard to work on. '''Ben''', I like your thoughts about a Christian Meta, but I think CKB could probably serve as this central hub. It is already on Wikia, providing a reliable server location. We could redesign this Community Portal (CP) (maybe even the Welcome page) to emphasize a &quot;Collaboration&quot; page (or set of pages, maybe featuring the Forum namespace). I don't think we would need a whole, separate, site just for collaboration purposes. This CP could also emphasize a separate CKB-only CP. I like your IRC idea below, too.<br /> <br /> :Also, in working on a [http://www.wikible.org/en/Wikible:Christian_wikis Christian wikis] chart over at Wikible, I noticed that CKB and ChristWiki have very different page counts (528 vs. 11911). Why would ChristWiki have so many more considering that it's a fork of CKB? Does Wikia calculate it differently? See my chart and footnote for more details. --[[User:RockOfVictory|J. J.]] 20:39, 7 August 2006 (UTC)<br /> <br /> ===Ideas of [[User:Denise|Denise]]===<br /> <br /> A few months ago I started my own multilangual Christian wiki project [http://jesus-wiki.org Jesus-Wiki]. But I've only just recently really started to work on it. At the beginning of September I finally noticed that there are other Christian wikis around. But because I've primarily been working on the German version of Jesus-Wiki, that shouldn't be a problem concerning the Christian wiki collaboration.<br /> <br /> As I've only just discovered that there's a discussion about Christian wiki collaboration, I don't really know what has been going on so far. So if I mention something that's already been said and discussed: I apologize for that.<br /> <br /> '''How I think Christian wiki collaboration should be'''<br /> <br /> I think there should be a multilangual wiki collaboration that is organized in a similar way as [http://wikipedia.org Wikipedia]. There should be one &quot;content wiki&quot; (a wiki with articles, etc.) for every language, plus one central Media Pool (or whatever you want to call it). It saves space and work (licensing, uploading, description, etc.). Maybe there could be another wiki with the purpose of organising the collaboration between the different languages. But the Media Pool could have that function. Of course there could be some specialized wikis (like [http://wikible Wikible] and [http://creationwiki.org CreationWiki]) that fill some special needs and concentrate on a specific aspect of Christianity. And I think the [http://christianity.wikia.com Christianity Knowledge Base] is a good idea too. But as somebody has said: It should be renamed. In general I think there should be a wiki system with general Christian topics written from a Christian point of view. As far as I know there have been [http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Christianity_Knowledge_Base_talk:Christian_point_of_view discussions] about what a Christian point of view should be. I haven't gotten involved in those yet.<br /> <br /> Why do I think there should be only one wiki per language?<br /> <br /> #It takes a lot of work to set up a wiki (organisation, structure, getting people involved, etc.)<br /> #We don't have enough people involved to be able to spare anybody. There should be as many people concentrated on one wiki as possible.<br /> #Overlapping articles also are a waste of time and work.<br /> #The whole purpose of Christian wikis should be to unify and create an overview of Christian ideas (and give more details too, of course). We don't all have to have exactly the same opinion, but at least we should find a way to work together. By creating varouns wikis for every set of ideas we would just be avoiding the whole problem and not solving it. If we don't work together, we don't need wikis. And if Wikipedia can do it we should be ashamed of ourselves if we, callins ourselves Christians (= one body!!!) and saying we're being guided by the Holy Spirit, don't manage to do at least as well.<br /> #If the wikis are organized well enough there shouldn't be any problems with being able to find the information we want. It's just a question of structure.<br /> #There should be even more reasons. Please feel free to add them here!<br /> <br /> I also think that the '''wikis should have certain things in common''', for example the Statement of Faith, the Aboutpage, the General disclaimers, the Privacy policy, etc. The General disclaimers and the Privacy policy could be based upon the ones of Wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer General disclaimer], [http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy Privacy policy]). Those articles deal with some problems of this world. So why not use a solution given by an organisation of this world as long as it doesn't conflict with God's word? Wikipedia must have a lot of experience with legal problems and I don't want to waste much of my time on law related stuff.<br /> <br /> There also is a domain problem. What URL should be used? I imagine that we all agree that the wiki system should use one main domain and subdomains. What domain will be used and what will happen to the other domains I do not know. I personally like the domain [http://jesus-wiki.org] because Jesus should be the center of it all. And of course there also is the Logo problem. But as soon as the domain problem is solved, it should be easer to choose a logo or even create a new one.<br /> <br /> At least somebody has suggested to host the wikis at [http://wikia.com Wikia]. I don't like that idea.<br /> <br /> #There are ads. Some of them might say exactly the opposite of what we believe.<br /> #There are other free Christian (!) hosting sites without ads. As far as I know, WikiChristian has it's own server. I am hosted at [http://project62.com Project62]. The host is extremely nice and I haven't noticed any server problems. All wikis could be hosted there.<br /> <br /> '''What to copy from Wikipedia'''<br /> <br /> I believe that the content on the wikis should be structured in a similar way as Wikipedia's. This includes the choice of software (-&gt; [http://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]). I don't know what extensions we'd want to install, though - if any at all. It looks more familiar to new users and makes them feel at home a lot faster if they are used to Wikipedia. And of course there just are certain articles (for example the editing help pages) that we can't edit without the help of Wikipedia or information from other wikis of [http://wikimedia.org Wikimedia]. But apart from that I wouldn't collaborate with Wikipedia. It is a secular wiki and has a lot of information that doesn't promote the Christian beliefs. And I would want the Christian wikis to be as independent as possible. There only should be links to Wikipedia pages if some information used on the Christian wikis was taken from there. I'd only mention Wikipedia if it's really necessary.<br /> <br /> '''The wiki structure and organisation'''<br /> <br /> The wikis should be structured and organized in an understandable way. If you take a look at the [http://de.jesus-wiki.org German version of Jesus-Wiki] you'll notice that I haven't even started writing real articles. I want to build a good foundation first. I haven't even uploaded pictures (the only exception is the wiki logo). If I am unsure about how I want to organize the content, why should I expect anybody new to Jesus-Wiki to find anything at all? That person doesn't have a clue whatsoever of what is around! And if there is a good structure, it is easier to add new content and find something to work on as well. I personally prefer working on organizing wikis rather than writing articles.<br /> <br /> Somebody mentioned that '''categories''' don't seem to work. I disagree. I believe that the Categories (would) work if they were/are used right from the beginning. It's work, ut it will pay off in the long run. It could be hard to start or try to fix an unstructured categorising system after a lot of content has been added.<br /> <br /> Another way of linking pages are '''templates''' with overviews. Take [http://de.jesus-wiki.org/wiki/Vorlage:Navigation_Namensräume Vorlage:Navigation Namensräume] and [http://de.jesus-wiki.org/wiki/Vorlage:Navigation Über Jesus-Wiki Vorlage:Navigation Über Jesus-Wiki] as examples. Wikipedia uses them too and I think they work. These templates look the same or at least very similar on every page you use them on. That keeps people from landing on the same page over and over again and goind in circles. If they click on a link of an overview template, it will be easier for them to find the samy information again and it will help them get an idea of how the wiki content is structured.<br /> <br /> We also have to think about how we want to '''organize the main pages''' of the wikis (Home page, Community page, Help page, Aboutspage etc.). Wikipedia seems to have problems keeping the information seperate. I personally don't like it if the same information can be found in various places. I want to be sure I've read all the information that's available on the topic I want. Some examples of how I would structure it:<br /> <br /> *The Home page should welcome people, give a general overview of what is available on the wiki and make it easy to get a feel for the wiki itself as fast as possible.<br /> *The Aboutspage should talk about the general ideas behind the wiki and be linked with the Statement of Faith, the General disclaimers, etc. I have done so on Jesus-Wiki.<br /> *The Community page should help make new users feel at home and give information about the community on the wiki. It should also contain information about what is going on, how you can get involved, help you find other users and make the communication between user easier.<br /> *The Help page only should contain technical help. For people that could be totally lost there also can be links to the other main pages.<br /> <br /> As far as I know the wikis will want to have at least one translation of the '''Bible''' within the wiki. I haven't really thought about how this could be done. I have seen some wikis have one page per verse. This could make it hard to see the verse in a bigger context, but it makes the linking of verses easier. I think it would be helpful to create a separate namespace &quot;Bible&quot;. This causes the linking to be a bit harder, but it makes it easier to look for something in the Bible because you can restrict the search to the namespace &quot;Bible&quot;.<br /> <br /> I've also seen that [http://wikible.org Wikible] uses the same '''usernames''' for all of its wikis. If it isn't too hard to set up such a system, I think it would make sense to do so. It makes it a lot easier to find the same person on different wikis.<br /> <br /> '''Building a community'''<br /> <br /> It is very important for a wiki to have a stable and growing community if it itself is supposed to grow. The Community page should be a easy starting point for that. There also should be something similar to the '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Babel Babel system of Wikipedia]''', although we should give it a different name because Babel is connected with too much negative aspects and it isn't just used for language purposes anymore (at least not on the German Wikipedia). It can be used to find people with certain abilities, interests, of certain locations, etc. Another possibility would be to build a '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trust_network Trust network]'''. Both systems could come in very handy and help us build an active community. By using those templates new users can also become familiar with using them and they can get experience in editing pages. I believe a user feels more comfortable editing his/her own page instead of editing the Sandbox page. But I could be wrong.<br /> <br /> We'll also have to talk about getting more people involved sooner or later. But all advertisement and promotion attempts can wait until the wiki system has been set up to a certain extent.<br /> <br /> Well, I hope this post isn't too long. I wanted to say everything I think is important at the moment and hope I've been successful at doing so. Please post your comments.<br /> <br /> - [[User:Denise|Denise]] 02:42, 18 September 2006 (PDT)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=User_talk:Denise&diff=70581 User talk:Denise 2006-09-17T21:56:17Z <p>Denise: </p> <hr /> <div>Well, I just wanted to edit this page before going to bed... Because of the different time zones I expect somebody to stumble accross this page before I wake up again. So I guess it would be smart of me to post this question:<br /> <br /> Could somebody please give me a short summary of what has been discussed about the collaboration of Christian wikis? Some helpful links would do the job too... Thanks!<br /> <br /> - [[User:Denise|Denise]] 14:56, 17 September 2006 (PDT)</div> Denise http://www.wikichristian.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=User:Denise&diff=70580 User:Denise 2006-09-17T21:53:01Z <p>Denise: </p> <hr /> <div>Hi!<br /> <br /> My name is Denise (as you can imagine), I was born on May 24th, 1988 in Switzerland and was raised here too. My father is Swiss; my mother's American and so that makes me Swiss-American. I'm very happy that I was raised in a Christian family and I'm a Christian as well (Methodist, but the denomination isn't very import, I think.).<br /> <br /> I've just recently started my own multilangual Christian wiki project at [http://jesus-wiki.org Jesus-Wiki]. It was only at the beginning of September that I noticed there are other Christian wikis - at least in English. But because I've primarily been working on the [http://de.jesus-wiki.org German version of Jesus-Wiki] that should't be too big of a problem. It should be very easy to collaborate with other Christian wikis. And that's what I want to do.<br /> <br /> I'm planning on posting my own comments on [[Talk:Christian_wikis]] very soon. I'll be going to bed in a few moments and don't have enough time right now.<br /> <br /> Good night and GBY! <br /> <br /> [[User:Denise|Denise]] 14:53, 17 September 2006 (PDT)</div> Denise