User:Prab/About WikiChristian
Welcome to WikiChristian. My name is Prab R. Tumpati. I am a full gospel Christian believer by faith and a medical doctor by profession living in the United States. I was born and brought up in a Hindu family in India who converted to Christianity due to a great healing miracle by God in our family. I grew up in a Christian missions base called Maranatha Visvasa Samajam, started by pastor Moses Choudary, who was called to work among high caste Hindu's.
I consider myself a technology enthusiast as I taught myself a lot of computer softwares in my free time. I have started successful websites like Residentscafe, a popular website for residents and residency applicants and Believerscafe with over 35,000 pages for christians. I felt a strong need for building a website that would let people to edit and add on content collaboratively would be of great help. I then came across the concept of wiki's and felt that it would be great tool for building an Encyclopedia for all Christians. Having seen the phenomenal growth of some wiki's like Wikipedia, I thought why not have a dedicated Christian encyclopedia! While there are many wiki's for secular information, we felt a need for a dedicated Christian wiki that will not only serve as a wiki community, but also serve as a source for information and an encyclopedia on Christianity. I strongly believe that there is strength in togetherness/unity and as a group, we can help build a free Christian Encyclopedia that represents the contemporary concepts in Christian Theology and Faith.
Wikichristian was started in January of 2005 by me, along with some friends like Graham grove from Australia, in order to build an open source Christian Encyclopedia. While I did all the technical stuff in setting up the wiki and posting a lot of public domain content, Graham and many others contributed greatly in building the site up to make it one of the fastest growing wikis. In fact, the website grew to over 115 MB as of August, 2005 and was utilizing upto 95% of the server resources. It lead to temporary problems with the webhost due to high CPU usage in a shared hosting. We had finally decided to get a dedicated server to help facilitate the growth of wikichristian. Our vision is to build a free Christian Encyclopedia, public domain wiki and Bible resource and a wiki Christian community representing the contemporary church thinking and philosophy.
I strongly believe that Christians have to rise up and stand for the important issues in the society in a day and age where truth is blurred and falsehood and sin are exalted. WikiChristian would serve as a forum to represent the current concepts and trends in Christian Community the world over and will serve as a source of information, fellowship and inspiration. As this is a collaborative effort, it can only be made possible by participation from users like you! Remember that "when you cast your bread on the waters with faith, it will return one day back to you with butter on top of it". May God bless you for your hard work.
As the founder, I declare that I do not have any commercial interest in this project and would keep the website not-for-profit. We may later register it as a not for profit organization, as we grow. If you would like to share your views on improving this project, please drop me a line at my email id above or leave the message in the talk page here. If you are a committed Christian interested in becoming a wiki sysop, you may contact us for information on how to become a sysop.
May God Bless you richly!
Philadelphia, USA,
January 2005.
You can reach me at prab at residentscafe dot com
or tumpati at hotmail dot com.
