How One Wikipedia Editor Unraveled the ‘Single Largest Self-Promotion Operation' in the Site's History
The answer is countries.
Turkey tops the list with Wikipedia entries in 332 different languages, while the US is second with 327 and Japan is third with 324. Other common words make their appearance as one looks down the list. "Dog" (275 languages) tops "cat" (273). Jesus (274) beats "Adolf Hitler" (242). And all of them beat "sex" (122), which is also bested by "fever," "Chiang Kai-Shek," and the number "13."
But if you had looked at the list a couple months back, something would have been different. Turkey, the US, and Japan were still in the same order near the top of the leaderboard, but the number one slot was occupied by an unlikely contender: David Woodard, who had Wikipedia entries in 335 different languages.
You ... haven't heard of David Woodard?
Woodard is a composer who infamously wrote a "prequiem"—that is, a "pre requiem"—in 2001 for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who had murdered 168 people with a truck bomb. The piece was to be performed at a church near McVeigh's execution site in Terre Haute, Indiana, then recorded and played on the radio so that McVeigh would have a chance to hear it.
According to the LA Times, which spoke to the composer, "Woodard's hope in performing the 12-minute piece, he said, is to 'cause the soul of Timothy McVeigh to go to heaven.'" According to BBC coverage from the time, Woodard "says McVeigh is '33 and nearly universally despised at the time of his execution'—like Jesus Christ."
Hoo boy.
Woodard also had a scheme to help save Nueva Germania, an 1880s colony in Paraguay that was designed to let German culture flourish away from the influence of European Jews. Friedrich Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, was one of the founding colonists. Elisabeth's husband killed himself as the colony collapsed; she returned to Europe. (Lest you subscribe to the common view that Nietzsche was himself some kind of crude racist, know that he loathed his brother-in-law's racism and cut ties with his sister when she left Europe. Unfortunately, due to his later madness, he eventually ended up under her care for several years, and she edited his works after his death in ways that made him look more like a proto-Nazi.) Some descendants of the colonists still live at Nueva Germania, but the colony is now poor and run-down, and Elisabeth's house is almost gone.
"As an artist who is fed up with much of the pretentious nonsense that has come to define Western culture," Woodard told SF Gate, "I am drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle."
So what was a guy like this doing with articles in 335 different languages? Inquiring minds want to know, which is why people have posted questions to sites like Reddit over the last year asking about the Woodard situation.
"Is he super important and this is the first I'm hearing of him?" one asked. "Is it a superfan polyglot who wants everyone to know about his favourite writer/composer? Is it someone using AI to artificially boost this guy's performance metrics?" The Investigation
A Wikipedia editor who goes by "Grnrchst" recently decided to find out, diving deep into the articles about Woodard and into any edits that placed his name in other articles. The results of this lengthy and tedious investigation were written up in the August 9 edition of the Signpost, a volunteer-run online newspaper about Wikipedia.
Grnrchst's conclusion was direct: "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."
A network of accounts with an unusual interest in Woodard was identified, and its activities over the last decade were mapped. Starting in 2015, these accounts inserted Woodard's name "into no fewer than 93 articles (including 'Pliers,' 'Brown pelican,' and 'Bundesautobahn'), often referencing self-published sources by Woodard himself." And that was just in the English version of Wikipedia.
From 2017 to 2019, the accounts "created articles about David Woodard in at least 92 different languages, creating a new article every six days on average... They started off with Latin-script European languages, but quickly branched out into other families and scripts from all corners of the globe, even writing articles in constructed languages; they also went from writing full-length article translations, to low-effort stub articles, which would go on to make up the vast majority of all translations (easily 90 percent or more)." Translated languages included Nahuatl, Extremaduran, and Kirundi.
Grnrchst concluded that "this amount of translations across so many different languages would either imply this person is one of the most advanced polyglots in human history, or they were spamming machine translations; the latter is more likely."
After a reduction in activity, things ramped up again in 2021, as IP addresses from around the world started creating Woodard references and articles once more. For instance, "addresses from Canada, Germany, Indonesia, the UK and other places added some trivia about Woodard to all 15 Wikipedia articles about the calea ternifolia ."
Then things got "more sophisticated." From December 2021 through June 2025, 183 articles were created about Woodard, each in a different language's Wikipedia and each by a unique account. These accounts followed a pattern of behavior: They were "created, often with a fairly generic name, and made a user page with a single image on it. They then made dozens of minor edits to unrelated articles, before creating an article about David Woodard, then making a dozen or so more minor edits before disappearing off the platform."
Grnrchst believes that all the activity was meant to "create as many articles about Woodard as possible, and to spread photos of and information on Woodard to as many articles as possible, while hiding that activity as much as possible... I came to believe that David Woodard himself, or someone close to him, had been operating this network of accounts and IP addresses for the purposes of cynical self-promotion."
After the Grnrchst report, Wikipedia's global stewards removed 235 articles on Woodard from Wikipedia instances with few users or administrators. Larger Wikipedias were free to make their own community decisions, and they removed another 80 articles and banned numerous accounts.
"A full decade of dedicated self-promotion by an individual network has been undone in only a few weeks by our community," Grnrchst noted.
In the end, just 20 articles about Woodard remain, such as this one in English, which does not mention the controversy.
We were unable to get in touch with Woodard, whose personal website is password-protected and only available "by invitation."
Could the whole thing be some kind of "art project," with the real payoff being exposure and being written about? Perhaps. But whatever the motive behind the decade-long effort to boost Woodard on Wikipedia, the incident reminds us just how much effort some people are willing to put into polluting open or public-facing projects for their own ends.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Yahoo
Phoenix startup has creative housing solution
Old shipping containers are plentiful in the U.S., and architect Brian Stark knows exactly what to do with them. He began by designing buildings out of old shipping containers, which are scattered across the streetscape of Phoenix. His projects are as much about cost-saving as they are about being environmentally friendly, with the long-term goal of helping tackle America's affordable housing crisis. "We're not consuming or producing that steel, it already exists," Stark said. "There's a huge ability to save. And that's how I think we have to start thinking that way, is using what we have versus just keep on consuming." How the design process works Stark took his concept a step further and began designing homes for Phoenix's unhoused people out of the steel containers. The project was developed for the City of Phoenix with sustainable living company Steel + Spark, and the housing units are called "X-WING" shelters as an ode to the unit's "X" design. Each "X-WING" is made up of four containers, topped with solar panels and joined together in an "X" shape that also creates courtyards for its residents when placed beside another unit. Each container has five rooms, with one resident per room. The units are fully air-conditioned, which is crucial for a city that reaches record temperatures every year. Most importantly, the shelters only take a week to construct. Jay Spicer, who lives in one of the "X-WING" rooms with his dog, Dino, qualified for the unit by staying sober for eight months and holding a job as a forklift operator. Though it's a small space, it's his own. "It is my space for now," Spicer says, "we keep the door shut, it stays nice and cool in here." Approximately 771,480 people in the U.S. experienced homelessness on a single night in 2024, an 18% increase from 2023, according to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In Arizona, approximately 14,737 people experienced homelessness on a single night in 2024, up 3% from 2023, according to the Homelessness in Arizona Annual Report published by the Arizona Department of Economic Security. Plans for shipping containers Stark doesn't plan on stopping with the "X-WING" shelters, either. His next big plan is to tackle the country's affordable housing crisis by building a 105-unit apartment complex out of shipping containers, specifically for low-income or unhoused senior citizens. Despite challenges with selling his ideas to certain developers, Stark can tell he's making a huge difference for people. "It's great talking to people who are living in the X-WING that say, 'I can hear myself think for the first time, and I'm improving my life,'" Stark says, "to be part of the solution is great, it's unbelievable." Saturday Sessions: Lord Huron performs "Nothing I Need" Saturday Sessions: Lord Huron performs "Bag of Bones" Saturday Sessions: Lord Huron performs "Watch Me Go" Solve the daily Crossword
CBS News
13 hours ago
- CBS News
A Phoenix startup is turning shipping containers into shelters. Here's why.
Old shipping containers are plentiful in the U.S., and architect Brian Stark knows exactly what to do with them. He began by designing buildings out of old shipping containers, which are scattered across the streetscape of Phoenix. His projects are as much about cost-saving as they are about being environmentally friendly, with the long-term goal of helping tackle America's affordable housing crisis. "We're not consuming or producing that steel, it already exists," Stark said. "There's a huge ability to save. And that's how I think we have to start thinking that way, is using what we have versus just keep on consuming." Stark took his concept a step further and began designing homes for Phoenix's unhoused people out of the steel containers. The project was developed for the City of Phoenix with sustainable living company Steel + Spark, and the housing units are called "X-WING" shelters as an ode to the unit's "X" design. Each "X-WING" is made up of four containers, topped with solar panels and joined together in an "X" shape that also creates courtyards for its residents when placed beside another unit. Each container has five rooms, with one resident per room. The units are fully air-conditioned, which is crucial for a city that reaches record temperatures every year. Most importantly, the shelters only take a week to construct. Jay Spicer, who lives in one of the "X-WING" rooms with his dog, Dino, qualified for the unit by staying sober for eight months and holding a job as a forklift operator. Though it's a small space, it's his own. "It is my space for now," Spicer says, "we keep the door shut, it stays nice and cool in here." Approximately 771,480 people in the U.S. experienced homelessness on a single night in 2024, an 18% increase from 2023, according to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In Arizona, approximately 14,737 people experienced homelessness on a single night in 2024, up 3% from 2023, according to the Homelessness in Arizona Annual Report published by the Arizona Department of Economic Security. Stark doesn't plan on stopping with the "X-WING" shelters, either. His next big plan is to tackle the country's affordable housing crisis by building a 105-unit apartment complex out of shipping containers, specifically for low-income or unhoused senior citizens. Despite challenges with selling his ideas to certain developers, Stark can tell he's making a huge difference for people. "It's great talking to people who are living in the X-WING that say, 'I can hear myself think for the first time, and I'm improving my life,'" Stark says, "to be part of the solution is great, it's unbelievable."
Wall Street Journal
16 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
Yes, It Pays to Share a Home With Family. But Plan for Some Challenges, Too.
Whether it is college graduates taking over the basement because they can't afford to buy or rent, or grandparents seeking the security of family as they age in place, multigenerational households in the U.S. have skyrocketed. According to the Pew Research Center, between 1971 and 2021, the last year for which these statistics are available, the number of people living in multigenerational households quadrupled. The trend is driven by financial issues, the need for caregiving for both children and older adults, and delays in new household formation by young adults. But despite the benefits of communal living, there are challenges as well. Twenty-three percent of adults in multigenerational households say it is stressful all or most of the time, and 40% admit it is stressful some of the time, according to Pew. That is why flexible floor plans that enhance privacy, a healthy respect for boundaries and candid discussions upfront among family members are key to the success of any multigenerational arrangement.
