My feelings at the moment are that blogs are too linear—it would be quite hard to see which comments relate to which, which ones are most worth reading, and so on. A wiki, on the other hand, seems not to be linear enough—it would be quite hard to see what order the comments come in.
The same problem exists for paleogeography Q&A forum.
overall, the article proposes a way for massive collaboration in math, and explains the potential advantages which ultimately result from the inherent differences of human race and relativity (not the Einstein relativity, but the philosophical one which relates to the perspectives/angles of viewing the world in general): 1) the tendency of trying out different techniques to solve problems (assuming that we know exactly the same amount of knowledge), 2) the complementing nature of collective knowledge (if we know about different things), and 3) different strategies for approaching problems as people prefer and are good at different aspects of solving the same problem.
Different people have different characteristics when it comes to research. Some like to throw out ideas, others to criticize them, others to work out details, others to re-explain ideas in a different language, others to formulate different but related problems, others to step back from a big muddle of ideas and fashion some more coherent picture out of them, and so on. A hugely collaborative project would make it possible for people to specialize
mechanism 3: it is the difference that makes the human race flourish.
Sometimes luck is needed to have the idea that solves a problem. If lots of people think about a problem, then just on probabilistic grounds there is more chance that one of them will have that bit of luck
mechanism 1: trying out different techniques for solving the problem at hand
we don’t have to confine ourselves to a purely probabilistic argument: different people know different things, so the knowledge that a large group can bring to bear on a problem is significantly greater than the knowledge that one or two individuals will have. This is not just knowledge of different areas of mathematics, but also the rather harder to describe knowledge of particular little tricks that work well for certain types of subproblem, or the kind of expertise that might enable someone to say, “That idea that you thought was a bit speculative is rather similar to a technique used to solve such-and-such a problem, so it might well have a chance of working,” or “The lemma you suggested trying to prove is known to be false,” and so on—the type of thing that one can take weeks or months to discover if one is working on one’s own
mechanism 2: collective knowledge of a community is likely to better approximate reality; this applies especially to subjects like paleogeography; also related to relativity
what you would not tend to do, at least if you wanted to keep within the spirit of things, is spend a month thinking hard about the problem and then come back and write ten pages about it. Rather, you would contribute ideas even if they were undeveloped and/or likely to be wrong.
rules of the game
Suppose one had a forum (in the non-technical sense, but quite possibly in the technical sense as well) for the online discussion of a particular problem. The idea would be that anybody who had anything whatsoever to say about the problem could chip in
The platform and mechanism for collaboration
classification of finite simple groups, or of a rather different kind of example such as a search for a new largest prime
types of problems that require huge collaboration
there are certain kinds of problems that lend themselves to huge collaborations
the same for paleogeographic reconstruction, human genome sequencing, building large colliders, etc.