The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the most successful collaborative web projects. It is based on an open editing model, which allows everyone to edit the articles directly in the web browser. As a result of the open concept undesirable contributions like vandalism cannot be ruled out. These contributions reduce the article quality temporarily, consume system resources and cause effort for correcting. To address these problems, this paper introduces an approach for automatic editing rights management in Wikipedia that assigns editing rights according to the reputation of the author and the quality of the article to be edited. This analysis shows that this approach reduces undesirable contributions significantly while valuable contributions are nearly unaffected.

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the most successful collaborative web projects. It is based on an open editing model, which allows everyone to edit the articles directly in the web browser. As a result of the open concept undesirable contributions like vandalism cannot be ruled out. These contributions reduce the article quality temporarily, consume system resources and cause effort for correcting. To address these problems, this paper introduces an approach for automatic editing rights management in Wikipedia that assigns editing rights according to the reputation of the author and the quality of the article to be edited. This analysis shows that this approach reduces undesirable contributions significantly while valuable contributions are nearly unaffected.