Hi,
Two weeks ago I attended WikiSym 2006, the Second Symposium on Wikis, in Odense, Denmark. Finally here is a short report on what was relevant to me and maybe relevant for Wikimedia, Wikimedians, and Wikipedia research (that's the reason for crossposting).
With me there were some (but little) Wikimedians, so Sj and Brion Vibber. Participants (around 70) were scientist and community leaders or very active community members from different wikis, for instance Sunir (Meatball), Evan (Wikitravel), and Angela (Wikia). Compared to Wikimania WikiSym is both more academic and more broad in terms of wiki communities, while Wikimania is very centered to Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia communities) and free content. To my impression many people forget about the rich world of wikis beside Wikipedia or even think Wiki=Wikipedia. Some argued at WikiSym that Wikipedia may kill other Wikis because of that - there is no other Wiki of its size anymore.
Anyway - there is a large overlap between Wikimedia world and Wiki world in general. Sj and me agreed upon that the place for academic, peer-reviewed Wikipedia research is better WikiSym and not Wikimania, so both should collaborate, for instance asking academic Wikimedia submission to better submit at WikiSym instead.
Max Völkel has also written a short report about WikiSym at the swikg mailing list[1] for the Semantic Wiki community - he compared WikiSym and and the first workshop on Semantic Wikis at the European Semantic Web Conference - the latter is even more academic to his impression. But WikiSym was a real place where science and practise meet.
There were a lot of "open space sessions" with many discussions, for instance about the future of wikis in general, and interoperability between wikis. Have a look at the proceedings at
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2006/proceedings
Some more reports are at
http://ws2006.wikisym.org/space/Symposium+Reports
in the symposium wiki[2] - many particpants took notes there to document the sessions (yes, it's a wiki although it does not look like MediaWiki ;-)
The workshop on Wikipedia Research was very fruitful and I only got positive feedback. If your interested in Wikipedia research you should definitely have a look at the slides:
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00007102/
I'm looking forward to WikiSym 2007 which will probably be in Montreal (as far as I remember, no guarantee)!
Greetings, Jakob
[1] http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/mailman/listinfo/swikig [2] http://ws2006.wikisym.org