  Peer production projects such as Wikipedia or open-source software
development allow volunteers to collectively create knowledge based products.
The inclusive nature of such projects poses difficult challenges for ensuring
trustworthiness and combating vandalism. Prior studies in the area deal with
descriptive aspects of peer production, failing to capture the idea that while
contributors collaborate, they also compete for status in the community and for
imposing their views on the product. In this paper we investigate collaborative
authoring in Wikipedia where contributors append and overwrite previous
contributions to a page. We assume that a contributors goal is to maximize
ownership of content sections such that content owned (or originated) by her
survived the most recent revision of the page. We model contributors
interactions to increase their content ownership as a noncooperative game where
a players utility is associated with content owned and cost is a function of
effort expended. Our results capture several real life aspects of contributors
interactions within peer production projects. We show that at the Nash
equilibrium there is an inverse relationship between the effort required to
make a contribution and the survival of a contributors content. In other words
majority of the content that survives is necessarily contributed by experts who
expend relatively less effort than non experts. An empirical analysis of
Wikipedia articles provides support for our models predictions. Implications
for research and practice are discussed in the context of trustworthy
collaboration as well as vandalism.
