Wiki Textbooks?

Infotopia and Here Comes Everybody both discussed Wikipedia as an example of collaborative production of knowledge. I wonder if textbooks could be produced the same way. Jimmy Wales mentioned in his TED talk that we watched that Wikipedia is very cheap to run. Students could certainly benefit from cheaper (or even free!) textbooks. Instead of buying a $120 chemistry book that would be outdated in a couple of years and replaced with a new edition, an online textbook could be constantly updated to reflect current research and would not need to be reprinted each time.

Some measures would need to be taken to ensure academic integrity. Perhaps contributors would need to professors or authors that have published papers in the field. Wikipedia seems to be fairly academically rigorous for many of its articles. I know that I have used Wikipedia to study for tests and to help clarify questions I have about material from some classes, and often the Wikipedia articles are clearer and more detailed than the information in the textbook and than the information presented in class. I would imagine that a wiki textbook would probably be the same way, and with restricted authorship might enjoy a better reputation academically and would be a citable source in a paper.

One requirement discussed of successful collaborative production is that no one unfairly benefits (as with the AOL guides that Shirky discussed). As long as there wasn’t a publisher that was profiting from the online textbooks, I wonder if it would work. Perhaps the hardest part would be getting enough authors. Would enough professors and other knowledgeable and respected people be willing to contribute?

Otherwise, I wonder if Wikipedia is complete enough at this point to be used as a textbook. Instead of assigning readings from a book, I wonder if full classes could be taught from Wikipedia readings instead, or if a student chose to use only Wikipedia and did not buy the assigned book, if their grade would even suffer.

[note: after I posted this I just saw Vin's post from a couple of days ago, and I completely agree. I wonder, could there be some kind of academic audit run on Wikipedia to legitimize it more? Have there been studies done to see if articles on Wikipedia are up to the same standards as textbooks and academic papers?]