What do you know about WIKIS?

... again, I know that Iris has some background on this. What do you know about it?

And FYI: The First International Wikimedia Conference will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, from 4 August 2005 to 8 August 2005.

I plan to go. - Topics include:

Wiki research: How do wikis, and the Wikimedia wikis in particular, operate? Which processes scale and which ones don't? What kinds of people or social structures are well-suited to wikis? How does introducing a wiki into existing project groups change group dynamics?
Wiki sociology: What motivates Wikimedians and what drives them away? Who are they, anyway? And where do they come from?
Wiki critics: Critical positions are welcome: why Wikipedia will never be an encyclopedia, why Wikinews can never substitute newspapers, why amateurs shouldn't be allowed to edit, and so forth.
Wiki technology ideas: What can we do to address perceived and real problems, for example, peer review? How can we provide better-nuanced or more immediate user feedback?
Wiki software ideas: What cutting edge wiki technology is out there? How can wikis be designed to fit better into corporate, political, legal, or other environments?
Wiki community ideas: How can we deal with small-scale and large-scale conflicts? How can we bring the community closer together and build a shared belief in our mission?
Wiki project ideas: Which successful projects in your Wikimedia project exist that other languages and projects don't know about? What new projects may we want to start?
Wiki content ideas: How could content be distributed to places that do not have Internet access? What other content creators could we cooperate with?
Multimedia: How do we get photographers and artists involved? Which existing communities should we tap into?
Free knowledge: How far are we from a world of free scientific journals? What can be done to get more existing knowledge under a free license? How can we help to preserve and distribute this knowledge, and provide universal access to it?
Collaborative writing: What is the status of collaborative writing outside the wiki world (Everything2, H2G2, etc.)? Do wiki projects raise the writing skill of the people involved?
Multilingualism: How can wikis help to bridge the subtle culture gaps across languages? How do other international bodies cope with language diversity? What linguistics uses are there for Wikimedia's multilingual corpus? How should we handle minority languages?