Prevent abuse on a crowd-sourced website

Question

I am building a crowd-sourced website where users can create new articles, update any existing articles in a category A. There is no ownership in all articles in category A. Because I wanna show instant response, I let the articles be updated without approval.

Currently, I am only using the Paper Trail (Ruby on Rails gem) to track changes, and revert accordingly. I will usually look at my database which are the pages last updated, then I will check against their contents.

This is quite tedious for a daily task. What is a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Not a technical answer but in my experience and research is to crowd source the checking. By the time you have enough users that abuse becomes an issue you should also have enough users to self moderate. Consider adding a report this functionality or create a moderator role that can revert content and then recruit from your user base.