There is Wikibooks for this kind of content, but I suspect that compiling and editing a book like this (hundreds of pages of content, extensive exercises, references to the literature, proofs and equations, etc.) would be very difficult on a wiki.
You need contributors who can dedicate enormous amounts of time, a good wiki system (most can't cope with automatic cross-references to equations or sections, and don't provide special formatting or indexing for exercises, proofs, etc.), and editors who can combine the efforts of the contributors and produce something coherent.
I'd like to see software that can handle this kind of text. ScholarlyMarkdown[0] is trying to do it, and something programmable like Pollen[1] would be easily extended to support TeX-like features.
The software won't solve the time sink problem, though. Knuth is like a monk, sitting in his room pushing out manuscript pages. Who else is willing to dedicate the time?
[0]: http://scholarlymarkdown.com/
[1]: http://pollenpub.com/
You need contributors who can dedicate enormous amounts of time, a good wiki system (most can't cope with automatic cross-references to equations or sections, and don't provide special formatting or indexing for exercises, proofs, etc.), and editors who can combine the efforts of the contributors and produce something coherent.
I'd like to see software that can handle this kind of text. ScholarlyMarkdown[0] is trying to do it, and something programmable like Pollen[1] would be easily extended to support TeX-like features.
The software won't solve the time sink problem, though. Knuth is like a monk, sitting in his room pushing out manuscript pages. Who else is willing to dedicate the time?
[0]: http://scholarlymarkdown.com/ [1]: http://pollenpub.com/