Sure.
I would take the example of Wikipedia. From a broad community with a broad set of expertise, you can come down to finding good, high-quality information. Is everything in Wikipedia true? Absolutely not.
I think there are certain things you can use the power of the crowd and the aggregate opinions of the crowd for. Allocating resources in real time as to where you see the resources should go is, I think, a good use for that information.
If you're trying to do longitudinal studies, you probably need some oversight over the meaning of the data and need some curation over the data itself. I think we shouldn't, though, dismiss community-provided data just because it's not curated and may not have the same level of integrity, because it can still provide incredibly valuable information for people, particularly for public workers on the ground. It can give them a sense, a signal about where their resources, their information should go.
That is very different from an historian's trying to pin down exactly what happened. I think we have to weigh the differences that exist.