That's the space Mendeley and CiteULike are in, for articles, and LibraryThing or GoodReads for books. (Back when I first joined I bought a LibraryThing account for SIAI that I wanted to donate, seeded with 300+ books from its shelves, but I wasn't taken up on that.)
They're all somewhat deficient, in my view, when it comes to group operation - all are heavily biased to collecting and managing an individual's references. But they're better than nothing; and better than the Wiki, which I don't think is very suitable. Bibliographic entries are a pain to work with manually.
Having a database of references, per se, isn't so valuable. What would make such a thing valuable to me is seeing annotations from the folks on LW that I can tell are more knowledgeable than me.
The Singularity Institute already maintains a Mendeley group, but it is just for literature cited by SI publications. Another Mendeley group could be created for "Useful References for Less Wrongers" or something, but it would require a Hero to maintain it, and I'm not sure anybody wants to put in the time. It sounds like a 100+ hours project to me.
Why aren't we systematically pooling many excellent and relevant academic articles yet?
I'm well aware of the current thread on the best textbooks for any subject, but why only share "the best" "textbooks"? I understand the desire for vetted quality, but I think we're missing an awesome opportunity here. I, for one, have a long (to me) list of fascinating academic articles I'm probably not going to read, but which I think other LessWrongers might very much like to be pointed to. For example:
We could have a database of some kind. And it could include articles that have already been well-spread here, like the seminal Kahneman & Tversky papers. Or the Singularity Institute's work and related work, such as Asimov's 3 laws of robotics and machine meta-ethics (S.L. Anderson), or the Transhumanist FAQ (Nick Bostrom).
I propose that we do so, and that we seek a balance between (a) quality and quantity and (b) organization (into topics) and simply adding, but that we also not worry too much about that right now and just start something. I envision adding article entries to some kind of simple database with (i) the bibliographic information, (ii) a link to a non-gated pdf if possible, (iii) a brief description detailing why it's bound to be very interesting to some LessWrongers, and (iv) a vote-up/down mechanism to allow fellow LessWrongers to agree that 'yes, this article title+description does seem exceptionally interesting'.
Main issue: determining the best way to share articles with each other, after determining that it's something we'd like to do.
P.S. I am unfamiliar with tagging on LW articles (having not written one before), should I add a tag/tags?