  Here are some possible reasons/motivations for writing: 1. organize your thoughts 2. show off your wit 3. make something beautiful 4. communicate with a large audience 5. provide a resource/tool that other people can use 6. make money off publishing your work 7. find the Truth (e.g., science, philosophy, etc. ) 8. gather the resources of human ideas and combine them and add to them in such a way that something substantially new can be added in order to expand those ideas to new frontiers Ok, now the webtool that I'm thinking of making called urlLink conorgan will be very public and interactive with its users.
I'm thinking of the urlLink wiki movement in which anyone visiting the website can access the content of the site and alter it. So, if you've got a piece of writing published on this website, anyone can edit it besides just you.
They can fix spelling mistakes, correct errors of facts, add analogies, add thoughts and ideas, take a story in a new direction that wasn't thought of before, or completely change the story from start to finish. It's all about the collaboration. Two heads are better than one. And that's the defining characteristic of humanity that separates us from all the other animals: intelligent, organized teamwork. You might be asking yourself at this point if your work is really your work anymore. What if someone comes and vandalizes the entire thing and wipes out all your efforts? What if you loose your sense of connection with your art to the point where it's not you anymore and you feel snuffed?
I'll try to explain how these concerns can be managed, if not alleviated. So, what happens if someone messes with your baby? Well, that's where versioning comes in. If the newer (messed up) version isn't to your liking, you can just revert to an older version and be back where you started with a few clicks of the mouse (no big deal).
The thing is, what makes you think that your work is going to attract so much attention to itself that people are going to want to mess it up in the first place? Think about this for a moment. What motivates a person to go out of their way to perform malicious acts of vandalism of works that are hardly known to exist? Isn't the thrill of vandalism connected to the idea that the vandalized will affect other minds? My little story hidden away in the depths of my website are hardly going to be important enough for anyone to even *want* to mess with because there's no benefit to anyone if it's messed up (including the vandal).
But in the rare case where someone *does* wreck it, it's a simple matter to revert through the version history to a more stable state of affairs. The point is, just as easy as it is to change and wreck and alter, it's just as easy to revert and fix and improve. If someone does something you don't like, then change it to something *you* like. Remember that people are lazy (much lazier than you are writing this piece of text). For someone to be motivated enough to get off their ass and change something in the world they would require a substantial reward (like seeing a poor artist cry because their writing was destroyed).
But if they know in advance how easy it is to simply delete the vandalized edit, and that it's not a big deal anyway because the audience for the vandalism is miniscule, then laziness will probably win out and nothing will happen. Don't worry about it. Keep in mind too that because you're the author and the person most highly interested in the text's development, you (and only you? ) will be paying the most attention to it and changing things around to what you think is best. Other people know this because they can see your name on it as the creator and will understand if you change something that has been altered by someone else.
It's like an unwritten rule that the creator/author of the work has a heavy say in how the text develops and what directions it takes. I mean, ultimately it is complete anarchy, but people have respect and won't cry home to mommy because the paragraph they added on to your novel got deleted by you or that you changed the paragraph's meaning.
They should just be happy that they're participating in the novel (having their name added as a contributor) and working towards a greater overall beauty in the world (and so should you! ) If you're concerned about how you're going to publish your work once it's done (now having been contributed to by many other people) maybe you should think about what your goals are. Are you a writer or an entrepreneur? If all you're interested in is making money, there are far better ways of doing so than writing!
I don't think that any person is an island or that one mind can come close to meeting the potential of many minds. We need to get over our capitalistic, exclusionary attitudes that our modern "American" society has imposed on us and think about the more fundamental benefits: beauty, humanity, relationships, experience, ideas, entertainment, and happiness. Money isn't necessarily part of the equation, so why are we getting so attached to this artificial utility?
If you really do want to publish your work eventually (and let's be honest, who doesn't want to publish their writing and get that sort of ego boost knowing that your words are "out there"? ) I don't think this is restricted as such. You might have to have included in your book a "page of contributors" listing the people who made contributions to your work and helped you out. You may have to co-author the work if another contributor made just as many substantial contributions as you did. It's all about being fair I think. If someone helped you out, then acknowledge that. If they helped you out so much that you think they deserve a cut of the pie, then why not?
Just be open and honest with everyone. Tell all the contributors that you're thinking of publishing the work, what sorts of financial returns you expect, and how you intend to distribute those rents to the people who worked on it (if at all). If you know for a fact that you did 99% of the creative work and that other people merely contributed spelling corrections and the like, I think it's reasonable to merely have their names included in the contributor's page. If someone else added 10 chapters to your book independently, then maybe you should consider rewarding that person with a substantial portion of the returns you are going to get from its publication.
At this point you may be asking what is stopping anybody from publishing the work. Well, not much. All work on the website will use a license that you can choose to bind a social agreement between contributors (e.g., a common clause of most licenses is that the creator's name must always be attached to the work). So if someone else (maybe even someone who didn't even contribute anything to the work proper) decides to publish the work, they can do so but only in accordance with the associated license agreement (e.g., they have to give you the credit you deserve). You may choose a license which restricts any kind of commercial distribution of the work by anybody besides the work's creator, for instance (this would also let people know before they themselves contribute substantially to the work that they have no guarantee to commerciality... but I'm sure if they asked you to be compensated for a really cool addition you wouldn't ignore them, right?
) There are other, more liberal licenses which allow absolutely anyone to sell the work. You could also outrightly contribute your work to the public domain to do with it as it wishes. The thing to balance is distribution, participation, and freedom versus personal gains and secrecy.
I'm not disagreeing with getting paid for your hard efforts or saying that it's a bad thing, but I just think it's important to keep things in perspective: what are your true motivations? Why do you write what you write? Remember that you're part of a society and not some solipsistic bubble. The most profound and life-changing (history making) ideas are the ones that are freely available. Socrates didn't hide all his thoughts to himself and only allow access to a privileged elite who could afford to buy his books.
No, he walked in the streets and told people right to their faces what he thought of them. He had some pretty cool ideas, but he wasn't afraid of someone "stealing" them because that simply wasn't what he wanted out of them: he was more concerned with proliferating his ideas and understanding human life than "copyrighting" and making a profit.
Think about it from the "believers" perspective. Are you going to want to learn about and integrate into your life an idea that costs you $10 and that you have to go all the way downtown to the book store to get (that is, if it's such a popular idea that you even know about it in the first place) or are you going to be more interested in a great idea that you can freely read about on the internet, in your own livingroom? I think the internet idea would more easily "get into" people's minds. And once there (if your idea makes sense and is interesting) it will be passed on to the others of that original reader's social network and thus the idea spreads and grows in understanding.
That's how things change. The work is judged for its value as a resource of information and knowledge, not as a physical economic rent. Do you want to change the world, or just make enough money to live? Put a different way, do you want to be a poor, popular, and influential writer or a poor, unknown, published writer? 
