What the author neglects to note is that no one person can just change a wiki at will and have it stay that way. There are lots of other people involved.

There can be challenges to the way someone has edited the wiki. Someone else can come in behind you and change what you've done. Always, you will be asked to cite sources...

Wiki is community, just like church--and there is accountability there. It's not a free-for-all, totally individualistic approach to knowledge. In the same way, an "open source church" could never be what this author is envisioning--because church is COMMUNITY. We do things together.

That can be frustrating when we want things to change quickly (e.g., women's ordination, full inclusion for LGBTs), but it also acts as a brake on change-just-for-the-sake-of-change. And that--IMNSHO--is not a bad thing.

It is that "container" . . . as Ann calls it, that attracted me to become a part of this expression of the Christian movement . . . and there is some evidence that this same sense is the preference of younger folk. It is a Divine drama that already provides for considerable involvement, depending on parson/congregation.

It seems to me that folks talk about all this rapid electronic communication and connection as if human nature has changed. As I recall, there were comments of that sort in my childhood, too, about "the peace generation."

I remain unconvinced. Toddlers and adolescents (to take specific but not exclusive examples) need limits to feel sufficient identity and safety to grow up appropriately. We need to consider who we are, and which boundaries and structures are necessary - and which aren't! - but these new technologies haven't changed what it means to be human, or within that Christian or Anglican. There's value in being flexible, and in sometimes being prophetic; but that doesn't make it good to fall into a Wiki mentality about how we understand ourselves.

Marshall Scott

As someone who edits actively on Wikipedia, let me talk a bit about what's going on there. Most of what's going on is just vandalism or playing, by my not necessarily very scientific test: on any reasonably public article, most edits will shortly be reverted because they are gibberish or "Hi Mom!" changes. After that there are the fanboy obsessives who are grinding through the Argentinian navy or Brazilian football players or soap opera actresses; along side them are the bureaucratic minions who ensure that everything is done consistently.

Then we get to the real stuff. There are lots of "POV warriors": people who are going to make sure that the text represents their side. Religious and nationalist viewpoints figure heavily in this, of course, but so do some social viewpoints. Perhaps most conspicuous is the LGBT task force, for one can be certain that even the slightest link to homosexuality will be remarked upon. All this takes a lot of policing: some of it accomplished by people having to keep an eye on articles, and some of it involves banning some participation.

So if church looked like this, every other week you would come in and someone would have tipped over the font. The altar would be pushed up against the wall, then pulled out, back and forth, and then you would have some determined person sticking it in the middle of the nave. There wouldn't be any prayer book because there would be small wording changes all the time, and one Sunday you'd find a Superman comic in the leaflet instead of the Eucharist. Every few months there would be a drastic change to the liturgy, and you would never know next week if that change would be gone entirely or used as the basis for the next series of small changes. Someone would spend a month sticking Marian devotions in the middle of the service, and he would eventually get in a knockdown, drag-out contest with someone else who was more or less an iconoclast. The verger's main job would be to keep either of them from updating the bulletin or rearranging the furniture.

C. Wingate - thanks for the inside scoop on Wikipedia -- my imagination for a wiki-church is running wild.

Thanks very much for that look behind the curtain, C. Wingate.