This week, the Signpost takes a look at some of the speakers who will be at this year’s Wikimania conference.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford University, founder of the Creative Commons, and board member of the Free Software Foundation. He is also the author of the book Free Culture and is associated with the movement of the same name. He will be speaking on Friday, 4 August, about open licensing, giving us his insight on new models of licensing as applied to collaborative projects.

Jim Giles is a news and features editor for Nature magazine, and author of the much-discussed Nature News article which compared some of the scientific content of Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia, and found that the two encyclopedias were comparable in accuracy [1]. Giles will be speaking about the article and about content analysis of Wikipedia.

Karen Christensen is CEO of the Berkshire Publishing Group, a publisher of reference works, and experienced international editor and publisher; and Paul Kobasa is editor-in-chief of World Book Encyclopedia, Inc. They will be speaking about traditional encyclopedia editing practices, and what traditional encyclopedias and Wikipedia can learn from each other.

Paul Ginsparg is founder of the free physics preprint collection arXiv.org, and professor at Cornell University. arXiv.org has developed into one of the largest preprint collections in the world and is a significant repository of works in physics, mathematics and computer science. It does not use peer review, but rather an endorsement system for contributors. Ginsparg will be speaking about information uncertainty and authenticity, and what academic publishing and Wikipedia can learn from each other. He also promises a detour through the world of Jorge Luis Borges.

Several notable people from Wikimedia projects will be speaking as well, including a keynote by Jimbo; Anthere on the history of the Wikimedia Foundation; Angela leading a discussion of cross-wiki features and policies; and Soufron on copyright topics, leading a workshop on copyright as applied to Wikimedia, and speaking to Wikimedia legal issues at large.

The full schedule of presenters and topics will be available soon on the Wikimania site. Registration is now open; please be sure to register early if you want to sign up for the discounted accommodation on site.

Next week, the Signpost will take a look at Hacking Days and other events planned for the week of Wikimania 2006.