The Wikireligiosus Project
As I did my doctorate thesis about religion & brain sciences in 2003 to 2005, it was possible to get an overview over the main body of relevant literature, although I had to invest some hundred Euros on books not yet available in libraries. But since then, there has been a tremendous growth of scientific publications concerning the evolution of religiosity and religions, ranging from archaeology to political sciences, from (evolutionary and cultural) psychology to sociology right into the various branches of (socio-, micro-, behavioral-, neuro- etc.)biology, theology, philosophy and many, many more.
Although the number of international and interdisciplinary scientific programs and conferences on the subject have improved in numbers and scope, every single scientist is increasingly hard pressed not to drown in the flood of publications, narrowing his or her perspectives on specific topics out of necessity. As a consequence, subtle rifts i.e. between those engaged in cognitive and those in sociobiological studies have begun to form, with quite diverse sub-languages and sub-consensuses emerging.
Rescue by the World Wide Web?
A range of bloggers and leading scientists in the field have faced this situation by the Internet. Networking Websites as the Evolutionary Religious Studies by David Sloan Wilson or blogs as this Scilog Biology of Religion or Tom Rees' Epiphenom are struggling to find, promote and link different studies and perspectives, contributing to the formation a globally growing "interested public".
Pondering a concept for a seminary at Jena University to introduce advanced students in the field, I decided to invest some work and money and to try another project. During the last months, I planned and prepared a specialized wiki about evolutionary studies on religion, which can be read by anyone, but whose (hopefully many) editors have to Log in with a password. Wikireligiosus.eu is now online.
From now on, students at my seminaries will have the opportunity to do their scientific workloads online, thereby learning to use the new tools and chances of the web and creating valuable content in the process. And we want you to contribute too, if you are having a scientific and constructive interest in the field. It is a unique chance to participate in building a scientific perspective and language, to promote good science and to discuss relevant topics with peers. Every created page is equipped with a counter (at the bottom, middle), so you can check how many people benefitted from your work, making humanity smarter step by step.
I would be glad if you would join The Wikireligiosus Project.
Thanks for your interest, with evolutionary greetings - Michael Blume
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Michael, your link to Scilog actually also points to DS Wilson's site.
I just fixed it. And you've proven that any web-project is depending on smart and alert contributors! I would be honoured to send your personal password for wikireligiosus (if you'd like)! :-)
Sincerely: As we seem to be interested in related topics, I would love to keep up the exchange and I'll add your blog to my blogroll. Thanks & best wishes!
Michael
cool
thx
Thank you, Sergey, for the kind encouragement!
Hate to tell you this, but I very strongly suspect that Sergey's comment is spam whose one and only aim is to get your blog to link to his website thus raising its profile. In my spam folder I've got dozens and dozens of wonderfully effusive comments from people selling penis enhancements and such like. Some are even quite long but, significantly, none ever include anything that is specific to my blog, such as actually mentioning the topic of the post. Typically, if I google the comment, I find 'Sergey' and his kin have made exactly the same remarks upon hundreds of other blogs. A psychologically clever one even asked for help in getting a feed from my blog to his rss reader. I might have complied, if he'd not left the same exact comments on 630 other blogs.