The California Open Source Textbook Project is an iniative focused on controlling the cost of textbooks. One idea intends to create a world history resource as a “wiki” and then convert some version of this resource into a printed version.
A wiki is essentially a collaborative authoring project with the assumption that individuals will contribute to expand or correct an existing work based on individual knowledge. This is a very interesting idea and one which has worked in the construction of open-source software. I have searching for a mature wiki in an area I think I know well in order to evaluate what I think of the potential of this approach without much luck. There appear to be some good examples in the “hard sciences” and computer science, but these are not areas I can really evaluate.
