I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way and Wikipedia is a success, but until reading this book it was a total mystery why Wikipedia worked the way it did. And judging by the press we've gotten, I'm not the only one who feels with way. If you'll remember, the mystery of how Wikipedia works has been compared to sausage, bumble bees, public bathrooms, etc.
Although the coolest part of the book is probably the studies and anecdotal evidence for the above, the big takeaway is that Surowiecki explains how to get the most 'emergence' out of a given system. That is, a given group can either make worse decisions than the dumbest member or make better decisions than the smartest member could, and he gives tips for achieving the latter. Some of these can potentially be applied to this project.
So after finishing this book I have been thinking a lot about emergence in general. Wikipedia displays emergent properties because each article is better than the contribution of each individual. Similarly, ants display emergence because an ant colony can accomplish things that each individual ant cannot even conceive. One commonality between virtually all forms of emergence, whether artificial or natural, is that they have evolved to provide answers and solutions. An interesting experiment would be to see whether questions can also be emergent. The idea being that some people are good at coming up with questions, and others are good at coming up with answers, but currently you need both skills in order to do research; this leaves out all of the people who can ask questions they can't find the answers to, and those who could find the answers if only they knew the questions.
So my thought experiment is, if a wiki project were created with just questions that can be answered non-trivially by science but which haven't bet answered yet, could it improve the efficiency at which science was carried out? Furthermore, could questions be emergent, in that if a bunch of questions are combined then can we think of new questions that no single person could think of on their own? I think it is easy to see how society benefits when every person has access to the sum of all human knowledge, but is there also a benefit to each person having access to the sum of all human ignorance?
Alex "pHatidic" Krupp http://www.alexkrupp.com