Pushing Your Point of View: Behavioral Measures of Manipulation in Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper introduces new behavioral metrics, C-Score and CC-Score, to quantify controversy and detect users attempting to push their viewpoints on Wikipedia, demonstrating their effectiveness in identifying POV pushers and assessing community moderation.

Contribution

The paper presents novel controversy metrics based on user attention and topical clustering, aiding in identifying POV pushers and evaluating Wikipedia's admin promotion process.

Findings

C-Score and CC-Score effectively predict which editors get blocked.

Adminship candidates show more stable behavior than prolific editors.

Wikipedia's admin promotion process is effective in maintaining community standards.

Abstract

As a major source for information on virtually any topic, Wikipedia serves an important role in public dissemination and consumption of knowledge. As a result, it presents tremendous potential for people to promulgate their own points of view; such efforts may be more subtle than typical vandalism. In this paper, we introduce new behavioral metrics to quantify the level of controversy associated with a particular user: a Controversy Score (C-Score) based on the amount of attention the user focuses on controversial pages, and a Clustered Controversy Score (CC-Score) that also takes into account topical clustering. We show that both these measures are useful for identifying people who try to "push" their points of view, by showing that they are good predictors of which editors get blocked. The metrics can be used to triage potential POV pushers. We apply this idea to a dataset of users who requested promotion to administrator status and easily identify some editors who significantly changed their behavior upon becoming administrators. At the same time, such behavior is not rampant. Those who are promoted to administrator status tend to have more stable behavior than comparable groups of prolific editors. This suggests that the Adminship process works well, and that the Wikipedia community is not overwhelmed by users who become administrators to promote their own points of view.