Would it be possible for WMF or another organization to initiate and potentially fund a project modeled on the Human Genome Project? That is, WMF or some other institution could host a large database of data that researchers can contribute to and that makes all the data available for researchers to analyze and build visualization tools against? Kinda like a wiki based on data from analyzing another wiki. ;) Such data might add a set of metadata on an article that could be used as a field in a hypercube, for example.
Beyond just hosting the database, it would be possible to write tools that check aspects of these data before commit to make sure that they are consistent with the other data that has already been committed. Large data set leave very unique signatures in aggregate. For example, we use checksums all the time to verify that data has been corrupted during transmissions.
I imagine this isn't the first time someone has thrown something like this in to the Wikipedosphere. If so, what did people think? If not, what do you guys think? :)
,Wil