I’ve now finished sitting through the first day’s sessions of Wikimania 2006, in a congenial environment at the Harvard Law School, with plenty of food and refreshments, and a good high-speed Wi-Fi network everywhere I went.

I expected a fairly calm, low-key discussion among amiable academics about the details of organizing and creating, uploading, and maintaining wikis of one kind or another; but I found instead that I was surrounded by roughly 400 passionate, intense provocateurs who see wikis not so much as a technological creation, but rather an intense effort to create, build, maintain, and protect what Larry Lessig (and others) have referred to as a “free culture.” Given the somewhat revolutionary atmosphere of the conference, I was slightly amused to see that traditional companies like IBM and Coca-Cola were among the sponsors, along with traditional Internet vendors like Amazon. One of the main sponsors was a company called answers.com, which bills itself as the world’s greatest encyclodictionalmanacapedia.

There are academics here, to be sure, and there are also graduate students from several different disciplines. But there also seem to be some hackers, some corporate representatives, some social/political activists trying to create wiki repositories to help people in developing nations around the world, and also a smattering of “old-timers” like me who are delighted to see the techy-geeky stuff we’ve worked on for 40 years actually being put to some good use. The energy level in all of the presentations, panel sessions, coffee breaks, and breakout sessions was both informal and intense: several of the speakers had a technique of rapid-fire, run-on sentences that made it difficult to take notes, or parse the meaning of their long, complex thoughts.

In addition to the traditional forms of presentation — e.g., keynote presentations, one-person lectures, and panel sessions — Wikimania also had a series of “lightning talks” during the final hour of the afternoon; these were opportunities for anyone attending the conference to give an impromptu 5-minute talk on any subject he or she wanted to share; no slides or formal handouts, just stand up and talk. This seems to be an increasingly popular approach in recent conferences I’ve attended, along with “unconferences” and “group breakouts” where a handful of 20-30 conference attendees will grab some corner of the conference meeting space, and sit down on the floor to have an extemporaneous discussion about some topic of interest

It was in one of these afternoon lightning talks that I heard (from someone whose name I didn’t catch; will try to find out tomorrow) about what was described as the “Chinese firewall” that has been invoked twice to block Wikipedia in China. I must admit I had never heard of the event, though a moment’s thought makes it obvious why such a thing might happen: the notion of freely-created, freely-edited intellectual content about anything must be an anathema to societies like China, not to mention Iran (where foreign words have recently been banned), North Korea, etc.

But as this afternoon’s lightning speaker observed, the Chinese government isn’t really concerned about Wikipedia itself; if they were, he said, they would be arresting people. What they’re more concerned about is suppressing the rise and viral spread of social networks that could potentially become politically active, like the “orange revolution” that took place in the Ukraine in 2004-2005. One Chinese person who happens to read a provocative or subversive item on the Internet and then decides to protest isn’t of much concern; after all, how much can any one person do in any country (as many individual Americans opposed to the war in Iraq are probably muttering to themselves each day)? But one person who joins together with another, and another, and ultimately 250,000 others via the Internet — that could be a problem, even in a country of 1.3 billion people, like China.

So, according to this afternoon’s speaker, the Chinese government wants to make sure that its citizens know that their surfing activities are being monitored, and that the content they see is indeed being censored; after all, people’s behavior tends to change when they know they’re being watched. Blocking Wikipedia — which happened once in June 2004, a second time in September 2004, and a third time in October 2005 — gets that point across. Significantly, the third block has not been lifted as of August 4, 2006.

In addition to this lightning talk on the status of Wikipedia in China, I also heard another blitzkrieg presentation about Esperanto Wiki, which turns out to be the 15th largest Wikipedia, with some 55,000 entries. Who knew? Well, if I ever get motivated to learn Esperanto, I now know there’s a good source of information in that language — along with 100 other languages. I also listened to a Venezuelan university student describe his group’s effort to create a wiki in a remote village within the country, in order to capture and organize their communal knowledge. Among the things entered into the wiki was a recipe for concocting a local alcoholic drink, and the villagers were apparently stunned by the empowering realization that once having entered the details into their wiki, it was immediately visible to everyone on the planet. Another lightning speaker described the similar concept of a “wikivillage,” which attempts to capture and organize sustainable resources for tribes, villages, and small communities throughout developing nations in South America, Africa, and Central Asia.

One of the things that has intrigued me about this conference is the number of bloggers who are doing their best to compose real-time summaries and abstracts of various presentations, which get posted within seconds after a talk has ended. I’ve seen three or four “instant blog” postings of Jimmy Wales’ opening keynote, and Associated Press published its own summary in the “top news” section of its website within an hour after Wales had concluded. I wouldn’t be surprised if the AP link disappears within a day or two, but the other blog postings will presumably survive. Meanwhile, I typed two or three pages of cryptic notes and gibberish to myself, which I’ll try to unscramble later this evening in order to compose a coherent summary of the keynote presentations of both Jimmy Wales and Larry Lessig.