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.
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 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?
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 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.
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.
...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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
This 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.
We 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. :)
Oh 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.
21 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] thread> 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...
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...
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 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.
And it isn't because of the self promoting described, but because of the response to it.
Deletionists are evil.
[0] https://youtu.be/vJ_pEP3fRvM
https://wikilingua.charlespierre.fr/
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.
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-bibl...