Call it democratic software development, or open source on steroids if you will.

Question

Call it democratic software development, or open source on steroids if you will.

I'm not just talking about the possibility of providing a patch which can be approved by the library owner. Think more along the lines of how Stack Exchange works. Anyone can post code, and through community moderation it is cleaned up and eventually valid code ends up in the final library.

For complex libraries an elaborate system should probably be created, but for a simple library it is my belief this is already possible e.g. within the Stack Exchange platform.

Example

Take a library of extension methods for .NET for example. Everybody goes their own way and implements their own subset of what they feel is important, open-source library or not. People want to share their code, but there is no suitable platform for it. extensionmethod.net is the result of answering this call for extension methods, but the framework hopelessly falls short; there is no order, or structure at all.

You don't know whether an idea is any good until you try it, so I decided to create an Extension Methods proposal on Area51. I belief with proper moderation, it could be possible for the site to be more than a Q&A site, and that an actual library (or subsets of it) could be extracted from it.

Feel free to give feedback to this particular idea on it's proposal page on area51, but it is just meant to be an example. This question is meant to find an answer to the general idea of creating an open source software library moderated by an open community.

Questions

Is it possible? What would be the main problems to such an approach?
Has anything like this been attempted before?
Are there platforms better suited for this?

Explanation / Answer

As a direct response to this quote from the original question:

Everybody goes their own way and implements their own subset of what they feel is important, open-source library or not.

My two cents: Design by committee is a failure to start with. Do you really want to have to import every single feature every single person on the internet thinks is a requirement ( am looking at you Jakarata Commons ) just because you want one of them that may be useful for you? It becomes a race to the bottom of mediocrity at best!

Imagine a code base edited like a wiki. Every time someone reformats the code or renames a variable a war would start: that sounds really productive.

Yeah I really want to moderate that crap, oh wait, moderation, that isn't community driven or "social" anymore, whats the point?

Voting doesn't magically make the best answer pop to the top, I have answers I wrote that got ZERO votes and accepted with the checkmark as correct, where other incorrect in the worst way answers had 10+ votes.

Popularity != Quality or Correctness!
Just because 42 CS students up vote some horribly naive empirically bad implementation out of ignorance and 2 down votes from seasoned veterans doesn't make it the best just because it got the most votes!

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