Krakauer's excerpt of Cole's article was poorly done. If you go to the source article, Clausen says,
“First, it seems like a rather remarkably lucky shot in the dark for a person to suspect the presence of a specific toxin on so little evidence," he wrote. "Couple this with the observation that ODAP is only reported in certain plants of the genus lathyrus which is not the genus hedysarum and the conclusions are even more remarkable (though not impossible). I would be much more convinced if I was reading the report from a credible peer-reviewed professional journal such as the Journal of Natural Products or equivalent. I have often heard a key indicator of bad science that is highly suspect is having its results published in the popular media."
...
"Again, I don't make any claims that the report is wrong since I have no data to analyze, but I am skeptical and will remain so until I see a better forum for the results to be published in." [1]
which to me sounds reasonable and, as a professional scientist, sounds just like what I (and I expect, my colleagues) would say. The peer review process isn't perfect, but it is consistently superior to the crap that is scientific journalism appearing outside of peer reviewed journals. Here's why, and why I don't understand why you would hold Krakauer as an example of citizen science.
Krakauer made (by his own admission) a "rash intuitive leap" [2] that an unidentified alkaloid contributed to McCandless' death, based on one of McCandless' journal entries and unpublished preliminary research by Clausen. As an aside, if one wants to piss off a scientist, that's a good way to go about it. When Clausen completes his research and finds the mystery alkaloid theory doesn't work, Krakauer intuits that a mystery toxic mold must have been involved, a theory he announces on Oprah and NPR. This second theory doesn't hold up (as was demonstrated by Clausen, again). Despite your conjecture, it sounds like Clausen actually investigated Krakauer's theories, up to a point. Krakauer then latches on to ODAP, which was close but still not there. His fourth theory may be correct, but Krakauer disseminated a lot of incorrect information along the way. I wonder, did he publish retractions as a professional scientist would?
I'm not sure why you would hold Krakauer's methodology as "citizen science FTW", but I'm interested to hear.
[1]: http://www.adn.com/article/20130917/krakauers-wild-theory-mc... [2]: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccandl...