How a Wikipedia editor discovered “the biggest self -promotional operation” in the history of the site
“Is he extraordinarily important and this is the first one I hear from him?” One asked. “Is this a wonderful Polyglot who wants everyone to know his favorite writer/composer? Is there anyone who uses artificial intelligence to enhance this man’s performance criteria?”
Research
A Wikipedia editor, which goes by Grnrchst, recently decided to find, and diving deeply in Woodard articles and in any edition that has named him in other articles. The results of this long and boring research are written in the 9th version of Sictpost, a voluntary online newspaper about Wikipedia.
The Grnrchst conclusion was direct: “I discovered what I think may be my biggest advertising operation in the history of Wikipedia, covering more than a decade and covering 200 accounts and even proxy IP addresses.”
A network of accounts has been identified with unusual interest in Woodard and its activities have been mapping over the past decade. Since 2015, these accounts have been named Woodard “in less than 93 articles (including” pliers “,” peelan brown “and” bundesautobahn “) and often referred to their sources published by Woodard themselves.” And that was only in the English version of Wikipedia.
From 2017 to 2019, accounts have created articles on David Woodard at least 92 different languages, creating a new article every six days … they started with European languages, but quickly in other families and scripts from around Korea, even writing articles in structural articles, they also use articles. (Easily 90 % or more).
Grnrchst concluded that “these translations are in many different languages or implications that this person is one of the most advanced polyglets in human history, or they spam in the car’s translations; the latter is more likely.”
After reducing activity, everything increased again in 2021, as IP addresses from around the world began to create Woodard’s resources and articles. For example, “Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Britain and other places find trivial things about Woodard to every 15 Wikipedia articles about Tenifolia sauce.
Then everything became “more complicated”. From December 2021 to June 2025, 183 articles on Woodard have been created, each in Wikipedia a different language and each by a unique account. These accounts followed the pattern of behavior: they were “created, often made with a relatively general name, and made a single page with a single image. They did dozens of minor edits to unrelated articles before creating an article about David Woodard, then they did more than ten or much more detailed.”
Grnrchst believes that all of these activities mean “creating more articles on Woodard, and broadcasting photos and information about Woodard as much as possible, while hiding it as much as possible … I came to believe that David Woodard himself or a person close to him, managed this network of accounts and IP.”
Following the Grnrchst report, the Wikipedia World Based on Woodard removed 235 articles on Woodeda from Wikipedia samples with a small number of users or supervisors. Wikipedia were larger to decide on their community, and they eliminated 80 other articles and banned countless accounts.
“A full decade of dedicated self -testing by an individual network has been neutralized by our society for just a few weeks,” Grenachest said.
In the end, there are only 20 articles about Woodard, such as in English, which does not refer to the controversy.
We couldn’t communicate with Woodard, whose personal website is protected with a password and only “invited”.
Can everything be kind of a “art project” that is exposed to the actual repayment and is written about it? Maybe. But whatever the motivation of the decade to reinforce Woodard in Wikipedia, this incident reminds us of how much people are trying to pollute to open or public projects for their purposes.
This story appeared first ARS Technica.
