15 January

Today's the day when in 2001 Wikipedia first went online. Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based free content encyclopedia project. In other words, it's a mine of copy-and-paste information for kids across the world doing homework projects. And it's the last straw for door-to-door salesmen who have made a living from selling expensive printed encyclopaedias.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the web site. It is operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Currently it has more than five million articles in many languages, including more than 1.5 million in English and more than half a million in the German. There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, and 18 of them have more than 50,000 articles.

Sharing knowledge is a great thing. It's one of the things we naturally do as human beings. We learn something new and we can't wait to tell someone else what we've discovered. This desire to possess knowledge and share it with others is one dimension of the image of God in us. God is all-knowing; and all truth is ultimately his truth. What we know about things is just paddling in the great ocean of his infinite understanding of everything.

This way of seeing things keeps us humble. It's what the writer of Proverbs was getting at when he wrote these famous words:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

If you think you know everything, you're a deluded know-all. But if you think God knows everything, then you can enjoy the knowledge you do have as a gift from him.