It looks like a user in the HN thread noticed the irregularities on the Italian Wikipedia [0] and started the deletion discussion [1] that the article credits with kickstarting this investigation.
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?
Muromec 3 hours ago [-]
that was my expectation as well, because mosyt languages dont have a concept of articles
ks2048 19 minutes ago [-]
According to one count, 32% of languages don't have articles (although only based on 620 languages. 198 / 620).
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.
decimalenough 7 hours ago [-]
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.
I did, yes, that was a typo. I did notice it after the edit window was closed but the submission hadn’t had any traction so it felt silly to reply to my own comment to correct it.
Glad the submission was resurrected, I think it deserves it. My original comment was precisely to convince people to give it a read.
ViscountPenguin 2 hours ago [-]
Some of these are still quite suspicious imo. "True Jesus Church", a church of a few million people ranking above Jesus?
drdeca 7 hours ago [-]
Though, if you restrict to just people, then, surprisingly, Corbin Bleu is #20 .
opan 2 hours ago [-]
My first thought reading this was "who's Corbin Bleu?", but I guess that's how they get you. Next I'd check the article and contribute to its popularity (by views anyway). Similar to Distrowatch where you curiously click the most obscure distros near the top of the rankings to see what they are, which increases their rank even more.
brabel 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ks2048 21 minutes ago [-]
So, should the David Woodard article have a section about this?
asimovDev 1 hours ago [-]
What a coincidence. Just yesterday i watched a youtube video about Corbin Bleu being the 3rd most translated article on wikipedia after Jesus and Barack Obama. Not surprised to see that it was a one user effort once again
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?
decimalenough 3 hours ago [-]
"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.
nickm12 5 hours ago [-]
...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.
indigo945 3 hours ago [-]
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?
netsharc 3 hours ago [-]
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".
_3u10 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
emilfihlman 1 hours ago [-]
I find the hubris of this article absolutely disheartening, and toxic, and it frankly just reinforces how Wikipedia isn't a good place, and people who shouldn't have control over it have control over it.
And it isn't because of the self promoting described, but because of the response to it.
Deletionists are evil.
folkrav 21 minutes ago [-]
Care to explain what was bad about the response?
Jolter 1 hours ago [-]
Could you expand on why you feel that this series of deletions is wrong?
kunley 6 hours ago [-]
Honestly, what kind of harm was it?
varjag 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Levitz 46 minutes ago [-]
Reminds me of those "Edit Wikipedia as homework" college assignments.
decimalenough 6 hours ago [-]
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.
kunley 4 hours ago [-]
Didn't know that.
I was referring to translations, which while being silly seem not that much of an issue. After all he provided the content in multiple languages (I know, I know)
rchard2scout 2 hours ago [-]
It also does harm to the communities of smaller Wikipedias:
'a user from the Tumbuka Wikipedia reported that they had initially felt "hope and joy that a small community had then gained another native editor", before finding out that this account had been a promotional sockpuppet.'
jdranczewski 40 minutes ago [-]
Allowing mass machine translation of Wikipedia articles into other languages is a problem, because it floods smaller language wikis with low quality text. If a user wants machine translated pages, they can machine translate them themselves.
gpvos 2 hours ago [-]
One incident like this is not a huge problem, but it sets a terrible precedent that could turn Wikipedia into the same sludge as the rest of the internet. Best to nip this kind of thing in the bud.
Myrmornis 5 hours ago [-]
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.
decimalenough 5 hours ago [-]
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.
numpad0 16 minutes ago [-]
> it means that their Wikipedia is second-rate, or worse.
?
thrance 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Hard_Space 2 hours ago [-]
What a uninformative headline. I was going to chip in with the annoyance that a romance language like Romanian appends the article to the word, Russian-style.
theandrewbailey 2 hours ago [-]
Multiple definitions of a word is tricky to work around, especially when most of Wikipedia's documents are called "articles".
mrkramer 2 hours ago [-]
I don't understand why somebody didn't fork the Wikipedia and build the version where you can self promote. It kinda sucks that you are not allowed to claim and edit your Wikipedia page.
zesterer 2 hours ago [-]
They did. It's called 'DNS' and you can set up a 'page' about yourself if you want.
xanderlewis 1 hours ago [-]
It doesn’t kinda suck.
Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopaedia, which means it’s intended to come with some expectation of neutrality.
If you could edit your own page, do you really think it’d stay as factual and as neutral as possible?
Just make yourself a website.
nemetroid 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sure someone did.
mrkramer 2 hours ago [-]
Facebook and Instagram are too cheesy, I want something more genuine.
bondarchuk 7 minutes ago [-]
There's this wiki (I forget the link sorry) that always gave me the impression that it was made by people disgruntled they were turned away from wikipedia for original research, that's full of original research by self-styled experts. I'm sure you could write an article on yourself there, after all who's more an expert in yourself than you?
Levitz 49 minutes ago [-]
How is it genuine to write information about yourself in such a way that it seems crowdsourced?
mrkramer 7 minutes ago [-]
My idea was to have Wikipedia like platform where you could write about yourself and then have your friends, family and colleagues confirm that information or vouch for that. You can even turn things around and give permission to your friends, family and colleagues to write and maintain Wiki page about you.
I don't use LinkedIn but when I stumble upon someone's page, I often see testimonies from their work colleagues about them.
It’s a good idea to read whatever you’re commenting on
rsynnott 2 hours ago [-]
That is a most improper suggestion on this here orange website. It is established etiquette to _imagine what the content of the article might be_, based on the title, and then comment on that, preferably angrily. At _absolute most_ one can read the first paragraph.
Xss3 33 minutes ago [-]
No no, thats reddit. We shun this here. They embraced it long ago.
croisillon 2 hours ago [-]
or at least, that's what i guess is written in the guidelines
silok 3 hours ago [-]
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.
It looks like a user in the HN thread noticed the irregularities on the Italian Wikipedia [0] and started the deletion discussion [1] that the article credits with kickstarting this investigation.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44035222
[1]: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pagine_da_cancellare...
https://wikilingua.charlespierre.fr/
https://wals.info/chapter/37
> 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.
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...
I did, yes, that was a typo. I did notice it after the edit window was closed but the submission hadn’t had any traction so it felt silly to reply to my own comment to correct it.
Glad the submission was resurrected, I think it deserves it. My original comment was precisely to convince people to give it a read.
[0] https://youtu.be/vJ_pEP3fRvM
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.
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?
Sadly because it's 2025, he has a lot of competition for the award of "most insufferable douchebag".
And it isn't because of the self promoting described, but because of the response to it.
Deletionists are evil.
I was referring to translations, which while being silly seem not that much of an issue. After all he provided the content in multiple languages (I know, I know)
'a user from the Tumbuka Wikipedia reported that they had initially felt "hope and joy that a small community had then gained another native editor", before finding out that this account had been a promotional sockpuppet.'
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.
?
I prefee my Wikipedia to remain 100% human generated quality information over garbage AI slop content, which is already abundant enough on the internet.
Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopaedia, which means it’s intended to come with some expectation of neutrality.
If you could edit your own page, do you really think it’d stay as factual and as neutral as possible?
Just make yourself a website.
I don't use LinkedIn but when I stumble upon someone's page, I often see testimonies from their work colleagues about them.
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.