This one is so sim­ple, so obvi­ous, so impor­tant, and so inevitable that I’ll sim­ply show you the pieces. You stick them together.

1. Project Guten­berg has pro­duced and dis­trib­uted lit­er­ally thou­sands of com­plete texts of impor­tant (and some­times not-​​so impor­tant) writ­ten works from the Pub­lic Domain. Here, for exam­ple, are the books released in the last 24 hours.
2. The wikipedia — ulti­mately, Ward Cun­ning­ham’s idea of a Wiki­Wiki­Web — has pro­duced an emer­gent, self-​​organized and anno­tated sys­tem of hyper­links and knowl­edge, where before there was just flat, hand-​​typed files of data that needed to be searched for knowl­edge. More impor­tant, it has pro­vided a model for large-​​scale dis­trib­uted par­tic­i­pa­tory, edi­to­r­ial library con­struc­tion.
3. there is no num­ber 3

Go do it. Or if it is done, tell me where.

The only trick I see is that one would like to add a “high­lighter mode” in a wiki — no change should be made to the orig­i­nal PG text; rather, anno­ta­tions should be added in a wiki layer “above” the immutable texts. Though of course there is always a back­ground level of errors in the texts that result even from Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ing.

That would take a lit­tle client-​​side Ajax pro­gram­ming. Seems emi­nently doable.

Still wait­ing. Crap. Maybe I can’t wait at all.