Math Annotate Platform?

I think such a thing would provide immense value. In particular I can think of instances when the following sorts of comments would have saved me a great deal of time:

(1) No need to read pages XX-XXX, here is a one paragraph argument.

(2) This result has since been strengthened, see ...

(3) The following claims are not quite right, here is a counterexample, and here is how to fix it.

(4) The following claims actually are right, even though the following might at first seem like a counterexample.

(5) What the author really means by [SGA] is [SGA N, page XXX]

(6) This result has the following interesting applications ... (6a) What would be even better is an automated system where, not just can you see what papers cite a given paper as you can today, but you can even see where a given lemma or proposition is cited.

(7) The author has only cited the relevant papers of his friends, the following other work in the subject is closely related.

(8) This paper is actually much less / much more interesting than it sounds...

(9) The following seems to be a gap in the argument:

(10) This 200 page paper assumes along the way in places which are explicit but maybe you didn't notice the following conjectures...

I think it would be essential however to ensure that people post under their own names and other measures are taken to ensure responsibility and measure the credibility of authors, but I think at the present stage of development of the internet we know how to do that.

I also think items like (3), (4), (9), (10) will become increasingly important; already it seems that people who consider themselves sufficiently famous don't necessarily bother publishing in journals (and so are not subjected to the review system), or even if they do are perhaps sufficiently famous to override or intimidate the reviewers, perhaps by sheer number of pages, etc...

I think that such a platform would be extremely useful, but it also would need strong moderation to remove misuse, perhaps only initially. The moderation effort is not at all trivial as the experience of the arXiv moderators shows.

If this forum were a mathematical discussion forum, your question would be welcome, encouraged, and anticipated. I would be happy to provide input from a public citizen point of view.

This forum is meant more for answers, references, and perhaps derived questions. While I hope you get some appropriate input from here, I instead encourage setting up a wiki or participating in a forum like publishing.mathforge.org, which has been discussing related issues for a while.

I believe (after gathering a few search terms from suggestions about to appear) that you will find a lot of the discussion extant on various weblogs and related fora, and that you will see a number of issues to be avoided at some cost.

As with most community efforts, you will find the greatest success coming from a dedicated subcommunity which understands and represents the core values of the effort. Assemble that, and much of the rest will follow. It is my hope that what you propose will permit and benefit from contributions from the interested public.

Gerhard "Not A Professional Mathematician (Yet)" Paseman, 2013.02.17