Talk:Christian wikis

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 [email protected] 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

The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous
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.
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
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!
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 Christianity for an example of what a template of one possible way this could be done.

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

(--Graham grove 21:55, 24 July 2006 (PDT))

Point-by-point responses from Tom

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... --Tom 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)

The use of unhelpful usernames. Why can’t we all use our real names as our user names. It makes us less anonymous
Interesting idea, I think I like it. Especially for citing articles. --Tom 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)

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 "unhelpful usernames" 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). --J. J. 16:40, 25 July 2006 (PDT)
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.
I agree. "I" 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! --Tom 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)
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
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. --Tom 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)
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!
I agree with that. --Tom 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)

Can you give some links to examples of where people have found this to be a problem? --J. J. 16:47, 25 July 2006 (PDT)
The layout is never particularly logical.
Layout? What are you referring to? --Tom 06:41, 25 July 2006 (PDT)

Thoughts from JJ

G. Grove, I've noticed your comments about inter-Christian wikis over the past several months,[1] 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 (Wikipedia and Theopedia collaboration) and the BibleWiki (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 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 "best" Christian wiki; everyone has different web design skills, so some of the Christian wikis have better features than others—survival of the fittest, if you will.

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.

Please see my individual responses in Tom's section above, as well. --J. J. 16:34, 25 July 2006 (PDT)

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.

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.
Christian wikis are traditionally "Wikipedia-oriented" 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.
Your topics on the Christianity page seem to be more like Portals in the Wikipedia-sense. Using (overview) and (G.G.) at the end of article titles seems odd to me. Again, I guess I would put those kinds of details in categories.

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... --J. J. 20:22, 26 July 2006 (PDT)

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 --J. J. 13:49, 15 August 2006 (PDT)

Addressing the issue of brackets for "(overview)" or "(user-name)" etc.

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 "(overview)" or "(G.G.)" after a title. The reason I've been doing that though is to make the article clear. If it has "(G.G.)" after it, then I mean that it is my original work and is an opinion. If it has "(overview)" after it then it means it is an encyclopedia, neutral point of view article. Also then that leaves room for "(quotes)" for any topic etc. For example, if you look at Church you'll see the main page is "Church" 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. --Graham grove 21:42, 26 July 2006 (PDT)

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.

How about a Topic: namespace instead of Portal? Also, instead of Template:Overview showing An overview of 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.

I think this may work out well if we have a good how-to guide on making topic pages, maybe even using a subst template to start from. I may make my own prototype at Talk:Christianity/Dev (with closer adherence to Wikimedia formatting standards) if you think that would be helpful. --J. J. 19:11, 27 July 2006 (PDT)

Please centralize discussion related to my dev page at Wikichristian talk:Topics. --J. J. 11:10, 3 August 2006 (PDT)

Thoughts from Ben (CKB)

I'm copying this from the Christianity Knowledge Base since it brings up some more collaboration ideas. --J. J. 11:08, 10 August 2006 (PDT)

Here's another problem with Christian wikis: They're hosted on private sites, therefore there is no "centrality" to them. I think this wiki, since it's hosted by Wikia Inc., is more "central". I think it might be good for this wiki to specialize in apologetics.

What we could do is perhaps form some sort of ChristianWiki Foundation (sort of like the MediaWiki Foundation) and, under that heading, have a "Christian Meta Wiki", which would work like 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 "Meta-Wiki". 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? --BenMcLean 13:54, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

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 "Collaboration" 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.

Also, in working on a 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. --J. J. 20:39, 7 August 2006 (UTC)