I have a rather diverse background. I am an American but lived briefly in Africa and Europe. I moved an average of once a year until I got married. I began college as a Russian studies major but graduated with two degrees in music and an MBA in business computer information systems. I worked for a few years as a professional musician and for over twenty years in computing and communications, both in application development and in communication systems administration. For most of this millennium I have been doing research and writing, largely on matters related to Christian history in general and China in particular. I have a strong interest in contemporary evangelicalism, indigenous churches, the church in China, and developments in Christianity arising from the Jesus People movement in the late 1960 and early 1970s.
My username is the equivalent of “Joe Friday” in Italian. It is meant to convey that I intend (and to remind me) to write “just the facts.” In other words, I plan to exercise diligence to refrain from expressing personal opinions in my contributions to Wikipedia and just present facts. (Perhaps I am also influenced by the fact that when I was a musician, we thought it was funny that the famous opera composer Giuseppe Verdi would be Joe Green in English, a far less romantic-sounding name.)
As a first round of edits I have been working on incorporating research performed by myself and others over the last decade into the following (a indicates that the edits for an existing article have been applied or in the case of new articles submitted):
- 1910 World Missionary Conference
- Indigenous church mission theory
- Three-self formula
- Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign
- Cheng Jingyi
- Denunciation Movement (new)
- National Christian Council of China
- Struggle session
- The Christian Manifesto
- Three-Self Patriotic Movement
- Y. T. Wu
- Ecumenical China Study Liaison Group (new article submitted)
- Local churches (affiliation)
- Watchman Nee
- Evangelicalism
- Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy
- Parachurch organization
- New Covenant Apostolic Order (new article submitted)
- Evangelical Orthodox Church
- Christian World Liberation Front (changed from forwarding to Spiritual Counterfeits Project article)
- Spiritual Counterfeits Project
- Plymouth Brethren (preliminary edits on taxonomies applied)
- Plymouth Brethren Christian Church
- Exclusive Brethren
I feel that it is important that Wikipedia articles reference the best available sources on subjects (not just those that make a particular point) so that researchers can have a solid basis to use the articles as jumping off points to explore in greater depth. I also subscribe in principle to a model of information storage that is traceable to relational model used in database design, which essentially says that data should be stored under the unique key that identifies it. This reduces redundancy and facilitates consistent representation of information. As of February 2010, the articles related to the Plymouth Brethren, for example, overlap and are inconsistent. This is understandable because their history of dividing and recombining is complex, but I believe the subject deserves a careful review.