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.