How a Wikipedia editor can unravel the “Maximum Self-promoting Operation” in website history
“He is super important. Is this the first time I have heard his voice?” a question. “This is a huge fan-language multilingual, and I hope everyone knows his favorite writer/composer? Is anyone using AI to artificially improve this person’s performance metrics?”
investigation
One editor at Wikipedia recently decided to find out “Grnrchst”, dig into articles about Woodard, and introduce any editors who named him other articles. The results of this long and tedious investigation were written in the online newspaper of Volunteer-run Wikipedia on August 9.
Grnrchst’s conclusion is straightforward: “I find that I think the biggest self-promoting operation in Wikipedia’s history may be over a decade, covering up to 200 accounts, and even more proxy IP addresses.”
An unusual account network for Woodard was identified and activities over the past decade were mapped. Since 2015, these claims have inserted Woodard’s name “no less than 93 articles (including ‘Pliers, ‘Brown Pelican’ and ‘Bundesautobahn’), often citing Woodard’s own self-published resources.” That’s only in the English version of Wikipedia.
From 2017 to 2019, the accounts “created articles by David Woodard in at least 92 different languages, creating a new article every six days on average… They started with Latin European languages, but quickly dabbled in other families and scripts from all corners of the globe, and even wrote full-length articles in constructed languages that translated into massive translations; percentage or more).” The languages translated include Nahuatl, Extremaduran and Kirundi.
Grnrchst concluded that “this translation across many different languages either means that the person is one of the most advanced multichannels in human history or a spam machine translation; the latter is more likely.”
After the activity decreases, the situation has increased again as IP addresses around the world start creating Woodard references and articles again. For example, “Addresses from Canada, Germany, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and elsewhere add some trivia to Woodard Calea ternifolia. ”
Then things get “more complicated”. From December 2021 to June 2025, 183 articles about Woodard were created, each created in Wikipedia in different languages as well as a unique account. These accounts follow a pattern of behavior: They are “often created with a fairly common name and made a user page with a single image on it. They then do dozen minor edits to irrelevant articles before creating an article about David Woodard, then do twelve or so minor edits, and then disappear before the platform.”
Grnrchst believes that all activities are intended to “create as many articles as possible about Woodard and spread Woodard’s photos and information into as many articles as possible while hiding the activity as possible…I’m beginning to believe David Woodard himself or someone close to him, running the network and IP address for cynical self-actualization purposes.”
After the Grnrchst report, Wikipedia’s Global Butler deleted 235 articles about users or administrators from Wikipedia instances. The larger Wikipedias are free to make their own community decisions, and they deleted 80 more articles and banned many accounts.
“Our community has removed a full decade of personal network-specific self-advocacy in just a few weeks,” Grnrchst noted.
Finally, there are only 20 articles about Woodard, such as one in English, which does not mention the controversy.
We cannot contact Woodard, whose personal website is password protected and only “invitation”.
Can the whole thing be some kind of “art project” and the real reward is exposed and written? Maybe. But regardless of the motivation behind the decade-long efforts to promote Wikipedia, this event reminds us of efforts by some to contaminate open or public-oriented projects for their own purposes.
This story originally appeared in ARS Technica.
