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The Article in the Most Languages
- latexr 1y agoThis 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 1y agoQuite 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/Archive_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:David_Woodard 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:Wikipedia_articles_written_in_the_greatest_number_of_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikiped...
- brabel 1y agoSo 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.
- drdeca 1y agoThough, if you restrict to just people, then, surprisingly, Corbin Bleu is #20 .
- opan 1y agoMy 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.
- latexr 1y ago> Or did you mean to say "more interesting"? 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 1y agoSome of these are still quite suspicious imo. "True Jesus Church", a church of a few million people ranking above Jesus?
- madcaptenor 1y agoIt also ranks above Christianity itself. Another suspicious one on that list: the city of Kurów in Poland, population 2,725.
- colbyn 1y agoI 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 1y agothat was my expectation as well, because mosyt languages dont have a concept of articles
- ks2048 1y agoAccording to one count, 32% of languages don't have articles (although only based on 620 languages. 198 / 620). https://wals.info/chapter/37 https://wals.info/chapter/37
- dhosek 1y agoWhat I think is wild is that Indo-European languages have developed articles at least four times: in Greek (apparently from a weak demonstrative) with only the definite article, in Romance languages from vulgar Latin with both definite and indefinite articles, distinctly in Romanian where only the definite article exists as an enclitic (suffixed to the noun), and in some, but not all, Germanic languages, perhaps under the influence of vulgar Latin, but I’ve not been able to trace it in my meagre attempts to research the topic.
- _3u10 1y ago[flagged]
- kunley 1y agoHonestly, what kind of harm was it?
- varjag 1y agoIf 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.
- decimalenough 1y agoYup. 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 1y agoDidn'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)
- gpvos 1y agoOne 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.
- rchard2scout 1y agoIt 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 1y ago
- NobodyNada 1y agoThis came up on HN a few months ago, when someone posted a list of most-translated articles and Woodard was at the top: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031697 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44035222 [1]: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pagine_da_cancellare/David_Woodard https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pagine_da_cancellare...
- bbor 1y agoI could've sworn I remembered such a post, thank you so much for vindicating my hunch! At the time I figured there wasn't much harm in it, but in hindsight it's obvious that the absurd number of translations was the just smoke stemming from a self-promotion fire. Props to whatever HackerNewsian (YCombinist?) took the time to chase all this down and do this fascinating writeup! You will be remembered in /r/TodayILearned posts every few months for many decades to come, no doubt.
- philipwhiuk 1y agoI see the defense on that context that admins aren't really mods when practically speaking they do act like mods by closing discussions - in theory this is when "Wikipedia has reached an opinion". In practice it is very easy for it to be when it has reached their opinion.
- BrenBarn 1y agoFascinating! A detective story for our age.
- Myrmornis 1y agoFor 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 1y agoUsers 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.
- Myrmornis 1y agoI'm not sure why you're thinking that; perhaps you're remembering something from a few years ago, or perhaps you have a prior biased against ML/LLM solutions. The translations provided by Google Chrome of Chinese wikipedia pages seem great. For example, Linear Algebra https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BA%BF%E6%80%A7%E4%BB%A3%E6%95%B0 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BA%BF%E6%80%A7%E4%BB%A3%E6... The problem, as I pointed out, is that readers of non-English pages are accessing a second-rate Wikipedia. For example: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%B2%9D%E7%A5%96%E5%AE%9A%E7%90%86 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%B2%9D%E7%A5%96%E5%AE%9A%E7...
- thrance 1y agoScience 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.
- nickm12 1y 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.
- netsharc 1y agoIronically 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".
- indigo945 1y agoOn 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?
- shermantanktop 1y agoThis was clearly the endgame all along. Quietly having all these articles might be personally satisfying in some way, but his obvious appetite for fame or notoriety points toward him wanting the scheme to be exposed. In fact I would not be entirely surprised if he somehow instigated the discovery of his activities.
- Bengalilol 1y agoI 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 1y 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.
- dhosek 1y agoI’ve always thought that the criteria for inclusion on Wikipedia should simply be: is it true and is it verifiable. All the other criteria, notoriety, no original research, etc. really shouldn’t matter.
- mobeets 1y agoI totally agree but unfortunately it really is one of the fundamental laws of wikipedia. To me this becomes especially silly when editing math wiki articles, where you might be tempted to connect mathematical concepts (eg with a few lines of algebra), but writing this yourself in a wiki article is not allowed unless you can find a link to an external source making the same derivation!
- harvie 1y agoThis only offers me 19 languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Woodard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Woodard The article claims that it has 335
- silok 1y agoExplained 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.
- khalic 1y agoIt’s a good idea to read whatever you’re commenting on
- rsynnott 1y agoThat 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.
- croisillon 1y agoor at least, that's what i guess is written in the guidelines
- Xss3 1y agoNo no, thats reddit. We shun this here. They embraced it long ago.
- Tainnor 1y agoAnd when called out on it reply that the comments are often more interesting than the article which is a) trivially true when you don't read the article and b) probably because bickering in comments is more emotionally satisfying and requires a shorter attention span than reading a rather long article (I'm not immune, seeing as I'm now bickering about the bickering).
- Hard_Space 1y agoWhat 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 1y agoMultiple definitions of a word is tricky to work around, especially when most of Wikipedia's documents are called "articles".
- bbor 1y agoRandom unprompted fun fact: Articles are the main type of "Page" on wikipedia, but not the only type! Buried deep in their docs is the full list of 'namespaces', which you need to parse their XML dumps: class Namespace(IntEnum): MEDIA = -2 SPECIAL = -1 ARTICLE = 0 TALK = 1 TEMPLATE = 10 PORTAL = 100 PORTAL_TALK = 101 TEMPLATE_TALK = 11 DRAFT = 118 DRAFT_TALK = 119 HELP = 12 MOS = 126 MOS_TALK = 127 HELP_TALK = 13 CATEGORY = 14 CATEGORY_TALK = 15 USER = 2 USER_TALK = 3 WIKIPEDIA = 4 WIKIPEDIA_TALK = 5 FILE = 6 FILE_TALK = 7 TIMEDTEXT = 710 TIMEDTEXT_TALK = 711 MEDIAWIKI = 8 MODULE = 828 MODULE_TALK = 829 MEDIAWIKI_TALK = 9 Wikipedia is a donwright fascinating technical environment once you find the rabbit hole. Shoutout to their purpose-built version control site[1] and their brand-new SWE-focused project "WikiFunctions"[2], the first new wikimedia project in a decade! ...which, while we're at it, brings the total to 18: wikipedia, wikibooks, wikinews, wikisource, wiktionary, wikiquote, wikiversity, wikivoyage, wikidata, wikifunctions, mediawiki, commons, species, foundation, meta, incubator, and phabricator. Ok I'm done with fun facts, I swear! [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/ [2] https://www.wikifunctions.org/ https://www.wikifunctions.org/
- valleyer 1y agoPhabricator was built by Facebook, not Wikimedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator
- mrkramer 1y agoI 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.
- nemetroid 1y agoI'm sure someone did.
- mrkramer 1y agoFacebook and Instagram are too cheesy, I want something more genuine.
- Levitz 1y agoHow is it genuine to write information about yourself in such a way that it seems crowdsourced?
- mrkramer 1y agoMy 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.
- bondarchuk 1y agoThere'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?
- 1y ago
- emilfihlman 1y agoI 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.
- Jolter 1y agoCould you expand on why you feel that this series of deletions is wrong?
- folkrav 1y agoCare to explain what was bad about the response?
- Tainnor 1y agoApart from the fact that this was pure self-promotion, it was also spamming the Wikipedias of small language communities with low-effort autotranslated garbage, which I think is rather insulting.
- asimovDev 1y agoWhat 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 [0] https://youtu.be/vJ_pEP3fRvM https://youtu.be/vJ_pEP3fRvM
- cpa 1y agoShameless plug about a little game I wrote a few years ago, about guessing which pages exist in the most languages in wikipedia: https://wikilingua.charlespierre.fr/ https://wikilingua.charlespierre.fr/
- ks2048 1y agoSo, should the David Woodard article have a section about this?
- vhcr 1y agoWikipedia is not a reliable source for a Wikipedia article, so someone would have to create a news article talking about it.
- encom 1y agoThus completing the Wikipedia human centipede.
- equinoxnemesis 1y agoSee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Self-references_to_avoid#This_article_was_criticized_by_..._(articles_are_about_their_subjects,_not_this_website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Self...
- kjellsbells 1y agoThis may be a "well, of course it's that way" observation to some, but: the article on X in wikipedia is typically quite different in one language than another. So you can get interesting insights by reading about X in different languages. For example, the French article about David Hockney has a lovely Francophone twist in that the first few lines point out that he lived in Normandy for a few years, whereas Emglish Wikipedia buries the fact deep in the page. The page for VLC has a photo of the lead dev in the French page but no discussion of the plugin architecture. And so on. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to assume that the pages in some languages might be particularly strong if the topic plays a bigger role in the culture than in the English-speaking world.
- The-Bus 1y agoIt's also interesting to see what decisions editors have made about animals. In English, for example, the article for the African elephant[1] is just the animal's name. In Italian, Spanish, and Tagalog it's the scientific name of the animal. This makes sense in languages (like Spanish) where an animal may have a lot of different names depending on the country, region, or dialect. If you look at the article for Pig[2], you'll see at least fifteen names listed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant [2] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sus_scrofa_domestica https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sus_scrofa_domestica
- nickpsecurity 1y agoWe could probably add it to multilingual, training sets for A.I.. Previously, the ones trained on a thousand or more languages by Meta and Wycliffe used the Bible since it's the only complex, rich message translated to most, human languages. Which God said would happen to His authentic message. :) https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/meta-used-bible-to-train-ai-learn-over-1000-languages https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/meta-used-bibl...
- nativeit 1y agoOh boy, that picture of Woodard...I've never seen anyone who would look quite so comfortable in an SS uniform. Maybe Stephen Miller. Elon Musk looks like an imperial admiral from Star Wars being choked by Darth Vader's invisible hand. Once you see it, you won't be able to un-see it.