Wikimania at the Berkman Center

A shameful confession: if you're at Wikimania this weekend, I envy you, pure and simple. It's another Berkman Center event on the Harvard Law School campus, and is described by the organizers like this:

Both a scientific conference and a community event, Wikimania brings together members of the various Wikimedia projects in order to exchange ideas, build relationships, and report on research and project efforts. It also provides an opportunity for Wikimedians and the general public alike to meet and share ideas about free and open source software, free knowledge initiatives, and wiki projects worldwide.

Here's a link to the event's wiki, which has all sorts of information and ways of accessing events online, from IRC to podcasts. For instance, you can download an mp3 of Jimmy Wales' opening plenary here.

I'm planning to write more about Wikipedia--which is a topic I've posted or talked about a few times, but haven't really taken head on because, well, I've been thinking. It's a complex and interesting topic, one whose very existence is both determined by new Web technologies and definitively characteristic of the new Web. And it's a strange attractor for an extraordinary number of separate but often overlapping arguments: many of them about issues like reputation and reliability and, you know, truth. So, as I say, I've been thinking.

Anyway, I'd love to be in Cambridge, having spontaneous conversations in the halls about these issues and generally getting a feel for who these people are who have committed such extraordinary amounts of time, effort, intelligence, and learning to Wikipedia.

Eugene Kim told me, in a podcast we did a while back, that he had the experience in Europe, and he came away with enormous liking and respect for these folks and what they're doing. I just checked Eugene's wiki--appropriately enough--and he should be there. I'll check back in with him and let you know what he has to say.

In fact, I'll do some search-and-retrieval operations on what everyone's saying about the event and let you know about what I find of note. (Just FYI, it appears that a considerable scrum of A-list technobloggers are there and will no doubt have much to say, so if you want to hear about things from that perspective, you know where to find them.)