[Air-L] Looking for examples of aggregation communities

[Derek Hansen]

Colleagues,

I'm looking for some examples of communities of volunteers that help
amalgamate a collection of materials rather than create them. The
example we are examining is the Encyclopedia of Life, which aggregates
data from many different scientific databases (and user-generated
content such as Flickr images) into a coherent whole. The participants
are called "curators" and their main role is to validate and approve
content rather than create it. They also do a lot of work to integrate
the original content into a coherent whole.

What similar examples exist on the web today? What examples have
existed for decades or centuries?

Thanks ahead of time for any examples or thoughts.
Derek Hansen
Assistant Professor
iSchool
University of Maryland