Integrity in open collaborative authoring systems

Abstract

Open collaborative authoring systems have become increasingly popular within the past decade. The benefits of such systems is best demonstrated by the Wiki and some of the tremendously popular applications build on Wiki technology, in particular the Wikipedia, which is a free encyclopaedia collaboratively edited by Internet users with a minimum of administration. One of the most serious problems that have emerged in open collaborative authoring systems relates to the quality, especially completeness and correctness of information. Inaccuracies in the Wikipedia have been rumoured to cause students to fail courses, innocent people have been associated with the killing of John F. Kennedy, etc. Improving the correctness, completeness and integrity of information in collaboratively authored documents is therefore of vital importance to the continued success of such systems. In this paper we propose an integrity mechanism for open collaborative authoring systems based on a combination of classic integrity mechanisms from computer security and reputation systems. While the mechanism provides a reputation based assessment of the trustworthiness of the information in a document, the primary purpose is to prevent untrustworthy authors from compromising the integrity of the document. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.