This paper by de Laat is a soft science view of trust mechanisms on open-source and crowd-sourced media. Particular attention is paid to Wikipedia’s curation mechanisms. The author suggests that there are three broad mechanisms to handle trust in contributors. A system can infer trust through registration and/or a user’s track record. They can substitute trust by curation and other activities performed by non-democratically appointed individuals. Finally, the author suggests that a system can “background” trust by monitoring changes in near real time to identify malicious intent.

Overall, this paper provides insight into curation and monitoring activities in Wikipedia. The level of detail is light, and the author provides opinions and beliefs on open-source trust without hard statistics, formulas, or provable theorems. Read this if you are interested in discussing ethics and governance.