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Why aren't there any "crowdsourced" projects for mathematical textbooks?

Every year, many mathematicians put a lot of effort into crafting their own lecture notes or writing textbooks (or also research monographs). Why aren't there any open-source "crowdsourced" cooperative efforts towards book writing? The pros of this kind of collaboration are rather obvious.

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    $\begingroup$ But there are. $\endgroup$
    – Fred Rohrer
    Commented Jan 15, 2018 at 13:58
  • $\begingroup$ Mathematical articles in Wikipedia are an example of what you can achieve in this way. Most of them are of poor quality. $\endgroup$
    – Alexandre Eremenko
    Commented Jan 15, 2018 at 14:00
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    $\begingroup$ Keep in mind that doing this is not always an altruistic task. In many such cases I suspect the writing such notes and textbooks provides a useful learning opportunity to the author. $\endgroup$
    – Dave L Renfro
    Commented Jan 15, 2018 at 14:50
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    $\begingroup$ @AlexandreEremenko: Wikipedia suffers from its own set of problems, but most importantly it is meant to be an encyclopedia, not a textbook. The fact that a few of its articles are textbook-quality and textbook-level-of-detail is a fortunate accident. Textbooks are written very differently and with different requirements. $\endgroup$
    – darij grinberg
    Commented Jan 15, 2018 at 15:11
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    $\begingroup$ The question in the title is different from the question in the text. Which one do you want answered? I.e. do you want a list of polymath-type textbooks, or do you want a list of reasons why there aren't many crowdsourced projects for math textbooks? If it's the first one, then maybe this is a duplicate of the question @darijgrinberg mentions. If it's the second, there are some clear reasons: most textbooks come about through an author teaching a course for several years then deciding to turn the notes into a textbook, and by that stage it's too late for crowdsourcing. $\endgroup$
    – Tom Leinster
    Commented Jan 15, 2018 at 15:22

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The Homotopy Type Theory book is massively collaborative and regularly updated (through version control). It's also the definitive textbook in its field, and I think Voevodsky himself contributed to it. In particular, it is mentioned that:

We have released the book under a permissive Creative Commons licence which allows everyone to participate and improve it.

I've found it to be particularly well-written and comprehensible.

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