The thing about conceptual knowledge like computer science is there are many nuances to it and the only way to get a reasonably complete picture is to read from various sources told in different ways by different authors.

What you are suggesting may seem like a good idea but humans will always try to be lazy when they can, and a universal free textbook make it almost too easy for them. In reality, everyone's gonna read from the same book without many people knowing the full extent of the subjects. I think this will only speed up the reduction in the number of expert. If you need any proof just look at Stack Overflow and the js community.

the nice thing about such a book (or series of books) is that the net number of experts could only rise, because this is an additional (and very powerful) source of information for people to use who are inclined to become experts. also, there would be a huge increase in the number of non-experts or amateurs. this is a good thing because even having a hazy idea of how things work is more beneficial to ones ability to live and carry out duties of citizenship than knowing nothing. just because there would be a lot of amateurs doesnt mean that there would be less experts from what i can tell.

This, as many other things, is a people problem.

The number of experts in CS is not constrained by availability of resources (though that might not be the case for every field), but the number of people that have: 1. a minimum of inteligence to get through it, and 2. The motivation and determination to strive at reaching expert level over a long period of time.

So, throwing more resources at this will only marginally increase with the production of experts. Maybe it will lower the bar of #1 a bit, but the bottleneck is really in #2 and the people that are not willing to work hard and keep working hard despite apparent failure will drop off anyways.

It is the same with open source community. By now, we should be literally swiming in free software. Instead, what happened is that society use of open source increased, but hackers willing to volunteer their time remained the same or even diminished over the years (every kid dreams with being an entrepraeneur and hit it rich these days, nobody wants to be a dirty hippy anymore). The slack has been picked up by paid employees from sponsor companies instead.

> i find it amazing that in 2017, a time when the internet has been fully realized and adopted by millions of people, there is no open source, universal textbook hosted anywhere. most people say that there is, and that its called wikipedia, but i dont think so. wikipedia is good for reference. its also good for learning if you are very intelligent and motivated. but for people who are not super intelligent or who have not learned to learn yet, there isnt really a single, centralized, high quality solution for learning things.

They're not up to snuff, but these do exist:

* https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

* https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page

Plus, of course, https://www.khanacademy.org/

Why would you want one book? Can you even imagine trying to search through such a thing, or updating it? It's far better to have textbooks for each subject.

As for open source textbooks, here is one such initiative: https://openstax.org/

You mean something like this Physics textbook http://www.motionmountain.net/ ?