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In 2007 tragedy ended their long partnership. Mr. Gray set out from San Francisco on a solo trip on his 40-foot sailboat and did not return.

A couple of years after Mr. Szalay joined the project, a colleague introduced him to Jim Gray, who was a kind of rock star himself—in the computer-science world. Wired magazine once wrote that the programmer's work had made possible ATM machines, electronic tickets, and other wonders of modern life. When Mr. Szalay met him, Mr. Gray was a technical fellow at Microsoft Research and was looking for enormous sets of numbers to place in the databases he was designing.

in 1992 came the project that would change his career. Johns Hopkins joined the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project, a computerized snapshot of the heavens.

The scientists, along with tech-industry leaders whom Mr. Gray had mentored in the past, offered to help the Coast Guard search the open sea using any technology they could think of. Google executives and others helped provide fresh satellite images of the area. And an official at Amazon used the company's servers to send those satellite images to volunteers—more than 12,000 of them stepped forward—who scanned them for any sign of the lost researcher.

But Jim Gray was never found. Some of the techniques that the astronomer learned from the search effort, though, have now been incorporated into a Web site that invites anyone to help categorize images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The number of volunteers surprised the organizers. "The server caught fire a couple of hours after we opened it" in July 2007, he said, burning out from overuse. More than 270,000 people have signed up to classify galaxies so far.

Gene Wikis

It started under the name of GenMAPP, or Gene Map Annotator and Pathway Profiler. Participation rates were low at first because researchers had little incentive to format their findings and add them to the project. Tenure decisions are made by the number of articles published, not the amount of helpful material placed online. "The academic system is not set up to reward the sharing of the most usable aspects of the data," said Alexander Pico, bioinformatics group leader and software engineer at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. In 2007, Mr. Pico, a developer for GenMAPP, and his colleagues added an easy-to-edit Wiki to the project (making it less time-consuming to participate) and allowed researchers to mark their gene pathways as private until they had published their findings in academic journals (alleviating concerns that they would be pre-empting their published research). Since then, participation has grown quickly, in part because more researchers—and even some pharmaceutical companies—are realizing that genetic information is truly useful only when aggregated.