Since Mathoverflow seems to work well, what about a separate, student oriented, student run site. I suppose one of the already existing student oriented sites might host it. Maybe the reputation software and real name approach will work there as well.

See these two Area 51 proposals:

• Mathematics
• Calculus

It's a nice idea, and I think that everyone here would be happy to see the Mathematics and Calculus proposals for new Stack Exchange sites succeed. The thing that worries me is drawing an expert audience --- it's unclear whether an echo chamber of confused undergraduates would be very helpful to anyone.

I'd also note that the 'real name approach' you see on MathOverflow is no accident, or inevitable with the available software. The moderators worked at this pretty hard in the early days, emailing new users as they arrived explaining why using real names was a good idea.

@Pete, you're absolutely right, that there are plenty of people with the required expertise. What I'm not seeing, however, is what would motivate them to participate. When I was an undergraduate, I worked as both a TA and a grader for other undergraduate courses, and I think I did a fine job at this. But that's the point --- it was a job, someone was paying me to do it, and otherwise I would have been at the beach.

On a slightly different point, it seems harder to find the "superusers", e.g. Anton, who are willing to put a lot of time into managing the site, at a higher level than dealing with individual questions. Of course, the whole point of Stack Exchange is that this role isn't actually meant to be too much work, but I'm still dubious.

A site like that already exists: it's called artofproblemsolving.com!

Sooo... when the commitment phase is finished, that's going to be a lot of questions!!

I don't think they really expect everybody who commits to ask 3 questions. Remember that they're being extra cautious with the first round of SE 2.0 sites; they really want to make sure that they're going to be successful. I haven't been following the commitment numbers, but I'd bet that Mathematics won't be among the first new sites. Once a few sites have been running smoothly for a while (a month?), I expect they'll loosen up the requirements. After all, a promising site never seeing the light of day is a worse outcome than a decent-looking site going to beta and then flopping.

There are a bunch of similar sites like this that exist, and in the past have existed. But a problem with most of them is really the lack of experts and the lack of quality control (this partly comes with no experts, students / non-experts running things are less likely to care if someone posts blatant homework problems or nonsense, e.g.). And any non-textbook question tends to get unanswered in places like this, or get bad answers. I remember in high school asking a few questions I'd had about understanding some real analysis I was reading and did not get very sensible responses. Although it's been years since I've looked at any of them, so, it's possible they've gotten better since?