“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.
