Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright, but are based upon it. They replace individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, which are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management, with a "some rights reserved" management employing standardized licenses for re-use cases where no commercial compensation is sought by the copyright owner. The result is an agile, low-overhead and low-cost copyright-management regime, profiting both copyright owners and licensees. Wikipedia uses one of these licenses.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia (ⁱ/ˌwɪkᵻˈpiːdiə/ or ⁱ/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access the site can edit most of its articles. Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites, and constitutes the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger coined its name, a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. Initially only in English, Wikipedia quickly became multilingual as it developed similar versions in other languages, which differ in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one of 291 Wikipedia editions and is the largest with 5,081,662 articles (having reached 5,000,000 articles in November 2015). There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of over 38 million articles in over 250 different languages. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.

Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with more than 1.25 billion members worldwide. One of the oldest religious institutions in the world, it has played a prominent role in the history of Western civilisation.Headed by the Bishop of Rome, known as the Pope, its doctrines are summarised in the Nicene Creed. The Catholic Church is also notable within the Western Christian tradition for its celebration of the seven sacraments.

The Catholic Church teaches that it is the one true church founded by Jesus Christ, that its bishops are the successors of Christ's apostles, and that the Pope is the successor to Saint Peter. The Church maintains that the doctrine on faith and morals that it declares as definitive is infallible. The Latin Church, the autonomous Eastern Catholic Churches and religious institutes such as the Jesuits, mendicant orders and enclosed monastic orders, reflect a variety of theological emphases in the Church.

Local churches (affiliation)

The local churches are a Christian movement founded in China whose beliefs and practice are based on the teachings of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee. They condemn denominationalism and instruct believers to meet together with no name or basis other than the city or locality in which they reside. They emphasize the subjective experience of Christ as well as the Biblical truths regarding Christ and the church. Nee was influenced by the writings of the Plymouth Brethren.

Local churches are found on every continent and claim several million members.

History

Origins

The development of the local churches as a group can be traced to the conversion of Watchman Nee in Fuzhou, China. At an early age, Nee committed his life to Christian ministry. Mostly self-educated, he published his interpretation of the inner Christian life and of New Testament church practices through books and magazines after moving to Shanghai in 1927.

Witness Lee was an early follower of Nee's. Nee and Lee met for the first time in Chefoo in 1932. In 1934, Lee moved to Shanghai to work with Nee. One of Lee's many responsibilities was editing Nee's publications. In the following years, Nee published many works and held regular conferences and trainings for church workers. Nee, Lee and other workers established over six hundred local churches throughout China and Southeast Asia before the Communist Revolution of 1949.

Catholicos of the East

Catholicos of the East is an ecclesiastical title used by Eastern Churches. The title Catholicos, or "universal leader", is used in several Eastern Christian churches and implies a degree of sovereignty and autocephaly. The designation "Catholicos of the East" originated in the see of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital of Persia, center of the Church of the East since the early days of Christianity in Persia.

In the Church of the East, also known as the Nestorian Church, "Catholicos of the East" was one of the titles borne by the Bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, who was the designated Patriarch of the Church of the East. It is still used in two successor churches, the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, the heads of which are known as Catholicos-Patriarchs.

Later, in the seventh century, the minority Syriac Orthodox Christians who lived in Persia began using the title for its Maphrian, who was originally the head of the Syriac Orthodox Christian community in Nestorian-dominated Persia. This office ranked second in the Syriac Orthodox church hierarchy after the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, until it was abolished in 1860.