This is not interesting than the title initially suggests. It’s not merely a curiosity, but an investigation:
> I discovered what I think might have been the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history, spanning over a decade and covering as many as 200 accounts and even more proxy IP addresses.
Quite the contrary, the story is rather fascinating. (Or did you mean to say "more interesting"?)
If you want even more gruesome details, the story of how this all unraveled plus all sorts of info about Woodard, a positively creepy while supremacist, can be found on the English article's talk page:
And with this anomaly removed, the list of articles in the most languages is back to what you'd expect: the top 10 is all large countries and Wikipedia itself.
So they only got caught because they were too efficient in their scheme and rose to number 1 in translations. How many more schemes go unnoticed? Not saying Wikipedia is not doing a great job, just saying that there is probably a lot of such schemes and that it seems nearly impossible to stop them all. It’s sad that a lot of people don’t want the truth to be available, at least when it concerns themselves, they want you to only know what they think you should, like on their Instagram.
After a full month of coordinated, decentralised action, the number of articles about Mr. Woodard was reduced from 335 articles to 20. A full decade of dedicated self-promotion by an individual network has been undone in only a few weeks by our community.
I thought this was referring to articles as in the part of speech (i.e. there are nouns, verbs, but also article like “a” or “the”) given the title and something spanning across languages… I wonder what his exact thought process was that motivated all that effort?
I have great respect for and am impressed by the work that has been done. I also appreciate the explanations in this article.
One question remains (perhaps related to my limited knowledge of Wikipedia’s processes): why is there no reference to this work on Woodard’s page?
"Original research" is a cardinal sin on Wikipedia, meaning it's not eligible for inclusion in Wikipedia unless news outlets outside Wikipedia pick up the story and start publishing stories about it.
...and I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids!
I find it interesting that the whole scheme might not have been noticed had he been more modest and not tried to translate the pages into rare languages. We don't know the motive, but if it was self-promotion, these additional languages were presumably of negligible value yet risked the scheme.
On the contrary, it's precisely by "risking" the scheme that the self-promotion became effective.
It's quite unlikely for anybody to stumble upon any given English-language Wikipedia article by chance, given that there's literally billions of them now - therefore, the promotional value of having a Wikipedia article on something even in a popular language is negligible. However, by spamming all the Wikipedias, and having this "scheme" discovered, Woodard created a situation where he is widely reported on as the artist that spammed Wikipedia, and has therefore received the five minutes of fame that he so desperately wanted.
If he had stuck to spamming the English Wikipedia, would he have ended up on the frontpage of HN?
For some subjects, it's appropriate to host multiple versions of articles written natively in different languages.
But for other subjects, for example science and mathematics, it does a huge disservice to non-English readers: it means that their Wikipedia is second-rate, or worse.
Wikipedia should, in science, mathematics, and other subjects that do not have cultural inflection, use machine translation so that all articles in all languages are translations of the same underlying semantic content.
It would still be written by humans. But ML / LLMs would be involved in the editing pipeline so that people lacking a common language can edit the same text.
This is the biggest mistake Wikipedia's made IMO: it privileges English readers since the English content is highest quality in most areas that are not culturally specific, and I do not think that it's an organization that wants to privilege English readers.
Users can already translate English Wikipedia articles to other languages on the fly with Chrome etc. However, the quality of the translation is just not up to scratch yet, particularly for languages that are radically different from English; just try reading some ML-translated Japanese or Chinese Wikipedia articles.
Science and Mathematics have no cultural inflection? Do you speak more than one language? Each language has its standard sentences structures when it comes to these disciplines, and auto translators are very much not up to the task.
I prefee my Wikipedia to remain 100% human generated quality information over garbage AI slop content, which is already abundant enough on the internet.
If you let astroturfing happen on Wikipedia grounds it'll become a piece of useless crap just like the much of the rest of Internet. If you read the report you'll learn that the promoters weren't content just with their own entry but tried to sneak in references into unrelated popular articles.
Yup. From the report: On the English Wikipedia alone, Woodard’s name was inserted into no fewer than 93 articles, including Pliers, Brown pelican and Bundesautobahn 38.
This came up on HN a few months ago, when someone posted a list of most-translated articles and Woodard was at the top: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pagine_da_cancellare...
This is not interesting than the title initially suggests. It’s not merely a curiosity, but an investigation:
> I discovered what I think might have been the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history, spanning over a decade and covering as many as 200 accounts and even more proxy IP addresses.
Quite the contrary, the story is rather fascinating. (Or did you mean to say "more interesting"?)
If you want even more gruesome details, the story of how this all unraveled plus all sorts of info about Woodard, a positively creepy while supremacist, can be found on the English article's talk page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:David_Woodard/Archive_1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:David_Woodard
And with this anomaly removed, the list of articles in the most languages is back to what you'd expect: the top 10 is all large countries and Wikipedia itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikiped...
Though, if you restrict to just people, then, surprisingly, Corbin Bleu is #20 .
So they only got caught because they were too efficient in their scheme and rose to number 1 in translations. How many more schemes go unnoticed? Not saying Wikipedia is not doing a great job, just saying that there is probably a lot of such schemes and that it seems nearly impossible to stop them all. It’s sad that a lot of people don’t want the truth to be available, at least when it concerns themselves, they want you to only know what they think you should, like on their Instagram.
This only offers me 19 languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Woodard The article claims that it has 335
It’s a good idea to read whatever you’re commenting on
Explained at the end of the article:
After a full month of coordinated, decentralised action, the number of articles about Mr. Woodard was reduced from 335 articles to 20. A full decade of dedicated self-promotion by an individual network has been undone in only a few weeks by our community.
I thought this was referring to articles as in the part of speech (i.e. there are nouns, verbs, but also article like “a” or “the”) given the title and something spanning across languages… I wonder what his exact thought process was that motivated all that effort?
I have great respect for and am impressed by the work that has been done. I also appreciate the explanations in this article. One question remains (perhaps related to my limited knowledge of Wikipedia’s processes): why is there no reference to this work on Woodard’s page?
"Original research" is a cardinal sin on Wikipedia, meaning it's not eligible for inclusion in Wikipedia unless news outlets outside Wikipedia pick up the story and start publishing stories about it.
Fascinating! A detective story for our age.
...and I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids!
I find it interesting that the whole scheme might not have been noticed had he been more modest and not tried to translate the pages into rare languages. We don't know the motive, but if it was self-promotion, these additional languages were presumably of negligible value yet risked the scheme.
On the contrary, it's precisely by "risking" the scheme that the self-promotion became effective.
It's quite unlikely for anybody to stumble upon any given English-language Wikipedia article by chance, given that there's literally billions of them now - therefore, the promotional value of having a Wikipedia article on something even in a popular language is negligible. However, by spamming all the Wikipedias, and having this "scheme" discovered, Woodard created a situation where he is widely reported on as the artist that spammed Wikipedia, and has therefore received the five minutes of fame that he so desperately wanted.
If he had stuck to spamming the English Wikipedia, would he have ended up on the frontpage of HN?
Ironically now this person has become notorious for Wiki-pollution. Since he's an "artist", he can claim it was an art project.
Sadly because it's 2025, he has a lot of competition for the award of "most insufferable douchebag".
For some subjects, it's appropriate to host multiple versions of articles written natively in different languages.
But for other subjects, for example science and mathematics, it does a huge disservice to non-English readers: it means that their Wikipedia is second-rate, or worse.
Wikipedia should, in science, mathematics, and other subjects that do not have cultural inflection, use machine translation so that all articles in all languages are translations of the same underlying semantic content.
It would still be written by humans. But ML / LLMs would be involved in the editing pipeline so that people lacking a common language can edit the same text.
This is the biggest mistake Wikipedia's made IMO: it privileges English readers since the English content is highest quality in most areas that are not culturally specific, and I do not think that it's an organization that wants to privilege English readers.
Users can already translate English Wikipedia articles to other languages on the fly with Chrome etc. However, the quality of the translation is just not up to scratch yet, particularly for languages that are radically different from English; just try reading some ML-translated Japanese or Chinese Wikipedia articles.
Science and Mathematics have no cultural inflection? Do you speak more than one language? Each language has its standard sentences structures when it comes to these disciplines, and auto translators are very much not up to the task.
I prefee my Wikipedia to remain 100% human generated quality information over garbage AI slop content, which is already abundant enough on the internet.
[flagged]
Honestly, what kind of harm was it?
If you let astroturfing happen on Wikipedia grounds it'll become a piece of useless crap just like the much of the rest of Internet. If you read the report you'll learn that the promoters weren't content just with their own entry but tried to sneak in references into unrelated popular articles.
Yup. From the report: On the English Wikipedia alone, Woodard’s name was inserted into no fewer than 93 articles, including Pliers, Brown pelican and Bundesautobahn 38.
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