Since the time I first thought of buying my own domain and moving to a personal web server, I have been giddy with the heady excitement of what I can do with all the extra space I have on the server. After all, the blog only takes up a small percentage of my allotted space. So, I have been considering what kind of web pages I could inflict upon the world.

I definitely want to do something related to the Bible. For example, Rob Bradshaw uses his web space to host all kinds of articles and papers related to the study of the Bible. The reason I want to do this is because although there is a great deal of material concerning the Bible on the Internet, a large percentage of it is crap not of acceptible quality. I have been searching for some reliable places to send my students when they want to do research on the Bible. Because my students are just beginning, I need a site that will have only quality material, because they don’t yet have the critical skills in this area to tell the good from the bad.

So, I thought about creating a Bible wiki. There are a few of these out there already, but most allow anyone and everyone to edit (as is the case with most wikis). But while this may work well with some wikis, I would prefer to have one written exclusively by scholars. Call me an elitist, but I would prefer that people know what they are talking about before they write on a subject. Granted, this is not always the case, even with scholars. But I still don’t want my house built by a doctor or my surgery done by a construction worker. I’m just picky that way.

Obviously, this is not a project I can do by myself. Even if I had infinite amount of time, I don’t have the expertise to write with authority on all areas of the Bible. Nor does anyone else. So I thought to myself, do I know a community of biblical scholars who might be interested in this? And can I find such a community that is also computer and Internet savvy. Of course, the biblioblogging community came to mind.

I wanted to see if there was any one else who thought this was a good idea. Some of my students have already said they would like such a site, so I know we would have users. And I already have loaded some wiki software onto my site and am in the process of configuring it. Now all we need is some authors.

What I am proposing is a wiki, but not the traditional open wiki. Writing of pages would only be done by biblical scholars. I have already set up the wiki to require log in for authors. In addition to its limited authors, I would also like the pages to have a more standardized format than a regular wiki, so I we would be writing templates for some of the articles. This would turn out ultimately to be an on-line Bible dictionary of sorts, but one that would forever stay up to date. Whenever a new discovery came along, such as the Gospel of Judas, we could immediately have an entry to which we could send our students.

So, what do people think? Is this needed? Would this be used? And if so, are you willing to write for it? I would love to get a lot of feedback on this before I get started, just to make sure that I am not out on a fool’s errand. And for those readers who are not scholars, is this something that you would use?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Permalink