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Grammatical errors

I noticed a couple of grammatical errors on the main page that need to be fixed:

In the paragraph about Phase 2, the phrase "... but this needs tidied up, ..." should be, " ... but this needs tidying up, ...", or, "... but this needs to be tidied up, ..."

Same paragraph, the phrase "... articles need properly cross-referenced" should be, "... articles need to be properly cross-referenced."

In the paragraph about Phase 4, the word "will" should be deleted from the phrase, "... it will is important to maintain ..."

In the paragraph about other wikis, the phrase, "... but is aimed more at a more scholarly discussion ..." should delete the first occurence of "more".

My intention is not to nit-pick, but you will be more likely to attract scholarly contributions if the main page does not contain minor errors. Wes 19:40, 17 March 2006 (GMT)

I think a completely new main page should be considered. It's rather boring if you ask me. Lets make something on Main Page/Development --Ymmotrojam 22:14, 17 March 2006 (GMT)
Go for it. I've also unlocked the protection on the home page, so feel free to make changes there. --TonyBowden 20:34, 18 March 2006 (GMT)
I'd rather not confuse the main page by having a link to a different version yet. I'd much rather just improve the page. --TonyBowden 20:37, 19 March 2006 (GMT)

The ChristianWikis Project

just thought I'd mention this... It might be useful if the community here and other wikis collaborated together about how to better all of the Christian wiki community :-). http://69.250.40.75/christianwikis --Ymmotrojam 22:59, 24 May 2006 (BST)

Differentiating BibleWiki from Wikipedia

Since BibleWiki is one of the few w:Christian wikis with a NPOV, I challenge you to consider how it should be differentiated from Wikipedia (WP). WP obviously has a broader subject range, but this doesn't mean that BibleWiki participants wouldn't be just as happy contributing Bible material to WP. TheoWiki is a very similar project to BibleWiki, but in the end, the consensus was to transfer TheoWiki's efforts to WP instead. See the in-depth discussion for details. My main reason for bringing this up is to save people from duplicating their efforts, as well as redirecting focus to a project where the most people would benefit from it. Thanks for all your hard work! --J. J. 20:55, 7 June 2006 (BST)

Hi - thanks for the comments. Firstly, as a small point, it's not a "Christian wiki" per se; it's about the Bible, but not from a strictly Christian perspective. That said, I was under the impression that WP doesn't really want much of the content that we have here (see w:Wikipedia:Bible_verses for example). --Tmtm 07:20, 8 June 2006 (BST)
Ahh, thanks for pointing out that WP Bible verses debate! In that case, it looks like Phase 4 (adding Bible commentary) would probably be the best place to focus our BibleWiki efforts then. How are articles (not Bible commentary) here different from WP? --J. J. 17:20, 9 June 2006 (BST)
Yes, there's been quite a bit of movement on the commentary front recently, with content being 'seeded' from a variety of different sources. Much of the NT now has base material to work from, rather than expecting users to start from scratch.
At the minute articles here are different from WP mostly by virtue of the ones here not being very good, and rather old fashioned! Once we get past this, however, I think they'll differ in several key ways. Firstly, the majority of Bible characters, for example, probably aren't 'notable' enough to justify an entry in WP, so we'd always have many more articles here. For the "main" characters, and the introductions to the books etc., I would expect the articles here to more technical than in WP, with a lot more detail, and with lots more references to theological journals etc, along with a wider sweep of historic views. So where w:Ecclesiastes probably only really merits one introductory page, whereas we have Canonicity of Ecclesiastes, Texts of Ecclesiastes, History of the interpretation of Ecclesiastes, The relation of Ecclesiastes to Greek thought, The integrity of Ecclesiastes, Outline of Ecclesiastes, Metrical form in Ecclesiastes, The relation of Ecclesiastes to Ben Sira, The relation of Ecclesiastes to the Book of Wisdom, Authorship and date of Ecclesiastes etc. Most of this is overkill for WP.
Plus, we also have the semantic extensions which I suspect will become very useful later (see Kings of Judah for an example of a page that's now auto-generated. WP will probably move in some sort of direction like this at some point, but this site is a useful dry run at that in the mean time. --Tmtm 18:54, 9 June 2006 (BST)
I would definitely add the two points you've mentioned here to the About/Main page. Also, did you know that http://errancywiki.com points to BibleWiki by default on all its verse pages? I'm taking a "wikibreak" this coming week, so I won't be able to get back to you until the 19th at the earliest. --J. J. 19:44, 9 June 2006 (BST)

Semantic extensions

Semantic extensions. Sweet. Got anything other than table sorting? It's funny that I was just looking at this functionality on WP in order to spruce up the Christian wikis page there.... and what does "semantic extensions" mean, anyway? Where's the MediaWiki documentation? --J. J. 14:09, 23 June 2006 (BST)

See Semantic MediaWiki. There's a lot more than table sorting. The tables themselves on pages like Kings of Judah are dymanically generated; the list doesn't need to be maintained manually at all. It just pulls in all the pages where someone is annotated as being the ruler of Judah. --Tmtm 15:05, 23 June 2006 (BST)

An open letter to users and administrators of the various different Christian wikis

Hello,

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 "Christian wikis" 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.

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?

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.

There are also lots of other little factors that I believe stifle the growth of the various Christian wikis. These include

  1. The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous
  2. 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.
  3. 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
  4. 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!
  5. The layout is never particularly logical.

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 a trial version for new structure at [1] and comment at [2]

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.

Graham

Style and format

What is the correct style and format for an article on the Bible Wiki? To what extent, and in what ways, does it diverge from Wikipedia style, which seems to be the basis of this endeavor's policies and principles? Are there any pages you can provide me with that give an example of the "ideal" (or an approximation thereof) which we ought strive for? It would be wise indeed to have in mind some certain specific points of style and scope and layout, lest all of us go running to reformat the seed texts and end up stranded at opposite poles. I would be very willing to assist in expanding and tidying up this humble project, but I'll have no interest in it at all if we do not have in mind, from the Beginning, a plan. —Satan 18:36, 23 August 2006 (BST)

Hello, our "adversary" (Hebrew meaning of "Satan"). Documentation and uniformity is certainly something that's lacking here. I think a lot of the initiatives and goals for this site are admirable, but I've personally been more impressed with the Wikible.org project (e.g. Christian wikis and comparison page). I do, however, like the NPOV of this site, which is why I keep coming back. If I were in charge of the site, I would tell you to go ahead and start developing documentation in the Help namespace, being guided by the Wikipedia Guide to Layout. Welcome! --J. J. 14:07, 24 August 2006 (BST)
Indeed. The role of the adversary, of course, is an important one: even the god of the Jews recognized the necessity of criticism, of an outside view, of a prosecutor to make apparent the flaws in one's creation. You can consider me an adversary, but consider me the greater ally for it.
A Bible-focused wiki without Neutral Point of View will be rather useless in the long run; there are too many clashing opinions on too many issues. In contrast, a wiki which focused on providing well-sourced, noteworthy exegeses of the passages of the Bible would be of immense value. Its information could even eventually be transferred back to Wikipedia, when that site's restrictions become less severe in the process of its organic expansion in the coming years. But I don't see a lot of cohesion, consistency, or focus in the current site: if anything it's become something of a mess, due to being flooded with so many out-of-date and biased texts before it has the editorial vigor to do anything about most of them.
As for Help files, I might work on some if I could see any indication of what this site wants pages to look like. Is there any example of an acceptably-styled page anywhere on this site, to draw from? And, in what ways should this site's style differ from Wikipedia's? Are we going to use bold for page titles, &c.? —Satan 22:46, 24 August 2006 (BST)
I agree that there is no consistency, cohesion or focus here (although I probably don't see it as quite as bad a thing as you!) I've been concentrating mostly on getting content in rather than making it what we will eventually want. There are no definitive pages yet, but I agree it's probably a good idea to make one. To show most clearly how we differ from the other sites, I suspect it would be best to work on an exegesis of a fairly meaty and academically contentious verse or passage but that isn't really a flashpoint within Evangelical Christian circles. Ideally something where we have access both to historic texts to seed, and also for which there has recently been a good literature review so we can summarise the main positions currently. We can then show how to evolve the historic material into what we would expect now. Unfortunately I can't track down an ICC for Exodus (it seems to be the only volume our local university library doesn't have!), or I'd suggest something from Exodus 3-6 - although it might be better waiting for Volume 2 of the Anchor commentary, which seems to keep slipping its release date. Perhaps something from John? Any suggestions? --Tmtm 12:16, 25 August 2006 (BST)

List of Books of the Bible on Sidebar

This seems obvious. I don't know how to do it. I added a link to the main page that takes the reader to the list of Bible books. I was quite surprised that it was tucked away and annoyingly hard to find. Even if the sidebar, for the sake of size and convenience, had only links to the Old and New Testaments and one to the Apocrypha, that would be better than the way it is now. The idea, after all, is to get people to comment.

Christian Meta Wiki

Today, on December 10, 2006, the Christian Meta Wiki was created. Please join the discussion about improving Christian wiki collaboration. --Denise 23:05, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Translation choice???

I was just about to get really excited about this, but when I went to start writing an article, I found myself confronted with the King James. Now it's very poetic and historically important, but I am very uncomfortable in that dialect of English. I think that using it vastly diminishes the likely audience. But from what I can see, it shouldn't be very hard to just plug in different translations at will -- there are some links from individual words, but i'd do without those. Why not let people choose their translation? The Sword Project has many, many languages and translations available in clean, standardized electronic form, and I'll bet those folks would be extremely helpful if you wanted to get those texts in.

Please find a way to plug something other than KJV in, and I (for one) will be much more likely to contribute.

I also think you could get a lot of mileage by providing standard templates that people could use to indicate the point of view associated with given interpretations. If someone wants to described a specifically Lutheran or Calvinist or whatever take on a given passage, that should be fine, but it would be wonderful if readers could see that when reading. Now there's an infinity of potential labels, but a small number of general ones would cover a lot of ground (that is, 90% of the bang for some tiny % of the buck): you could get a fair distance even with just Catholic, Orthdox, Protestant, and Reformed.

We're not just KJV, although it seems like that in a few places - this whole area still needs lots of tidying up. We're restricted to works that aren't copyright, however. --Tmtm 03:28, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Don't cry about it. The AV/KJV has been around for a long time, it's widely recognized, and entirely reliable. Perfectly suitable for use in this English language wiki. - NoSnooz

Is the American Standard copyright? A good choice might be the World English Bible, which is a modernization of the ASV, made for the sole purpose of having a non-copyrighted modern translation. (www.audiotreasure.com). I know that the Modern King James is available for a free download, so perhaps that one is free to use also.Cfortunato 04:02, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Edited

I'm new here and don't know much about what to do....but someone included a bunch of profanity/garbage on the main page. I simply deleted the offensive material. Someone else will have to get it back to where it was. Llbruce 17:38, 21 February 2007 (UTC)Llbruce

I am also new here. I put it back to where it was. Is there any way to actually remove the vandalism from the history so it CANNOT be retrieved? Also, is the vandal IP address blocked? Cfortunato 20:50, 21 February 2007 (UTC) 20:50, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Hey, I'm new as well. What date did the vandalism happen(there are a lot of IP addresses on the history page)? I can probably get the IP address for you guys so that it can be blocked or something. If you guys need anything like that, I'm your man. ;) --Yahweh's 17:13, 2 August 2007 (BST)

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