There have been some attempts at this - assembly.com and one other company that I don't remember the name of. Has not worked out yet, as the contributors usually lose focus after a while
I was sad to see assembly.com close down. Seemed like a pretty solid structure for this kind of endeavour.
I wasn't familiar with assembly.com. I think that it would be a challenging thing to get right, so that such issues don't tend to occur, but it should be doable. One thing that is probably needed is people who join as project managers, to keep things on track and provide reports on each person's commitments, progress etc to other members (all of whom can rate the contributions of one another). When starting out that may not be necessary, but after it starts to gain momentum you may well need some additional help to keep the momentum going.