This was an experiment I somehow forgot to finish. It will not work with the 9th trait introduced in update 1.4, and since I'm not quite sure it's worth fixing, I'm uploading it now as is. Sorry for missing formatting in the following README excerpt, I don't feel like converting markdown to bbcode by hand.

*Mer Guild Research Notes* (GRN) add-on allows you to automagically
share information about item traits you have researched with your
guildies. First it needs to gather the data, so whenever you log in
or finish researching a trait on a character, GRN updates its stored
per-character and aggregate research data.

You can enable guilds you want to share your research with under
*Settings -> Addon Settings -> Mer Guild Research Notes*. In guilds
where you have the *Edit Member Note* privilege, your member note
will be augmented with encoded research data, which other guild
members with GRN installed can decode. The data looks something like
`#!GRN:a1406417716:W+WxuzgxfRwV!` and should not be edited manually,
but you may insert arbitrary text before or after it.

When you open the research tab at a crafting station, your GRN-enabled
guilds will be scanned for member notes containing GRN data. Unknown
traits' tooltips will then be augmented with a list of people who have
the trait researched and have shared their GRN data.