Peer production projects such as Wikipedia or open-source softwaredevelopment allow volunteers to collectively create knowledge based products.The inclusive nature of such projects poses difficult challenges for ensuringtrustworthiness and combating vandalism. Prior studies in the area deal withdescriptive aspects of peer production, failing to capture the idea that whilecontributors collaborate, they also compete for status in the community and forimposing their views on the product. In this paper we investigate collaborativeauthoring in Wikipedia where contributors append and overwrite previouscontributions to a page. We assume that a contributors goal is to maximizeownership of content sections such that content owned (or originated) by hersurvived the most recent revision of the page. We model contributorsinteractions to increase their content ownership as a noncooperative game wherea players utility is associated with content owned and cost is a function ofeffort expended. Our results capture several real life aspects of contributorsinteractions within peer production projects. We show that at the Nashequilibrium there is an inverse relationship between the effort required tomake a contribution and the survival of a contributors content. In other wordsmajority of the content that survives is necessarily contributed by experts whoexpend relatively less effort than non experts. An empirical analysis ofWikipedia articles provides support for our models predictions. Implicationsfor research and practice are discussed in the context of trustworthycollaboration as well as vandalism.
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