  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.
