A Wikipedia editor has uncovered what they call the most considerable promotion effort in the site’s history, all in service of pushing David Woodard, a musician who gained notoriety in 2001 when he penned a piece meant to be played for right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh before his execution.
The editor, known as Grnrchst, spent months digging through edits and articles linked to Woodard, which made him literally more popular than Jesus. Even the fake penis experts and those who forged their doctorates working at Wackypedia thought that there must be something wrong.
For those not in the know, Woodard famously told the LA Times the goal of his composition was “to cause the soul of Timothy McVeigh to go to heaven.”
He compared McVeigh to Jesus, saying McVeigh was “33 and nearly universally despised at the time of his execution, like Jesus Christ.”
To be fair to Mr Christ, most of the atrocities committed in his name happened long after his death and at no point did he say “blessed are the bomb makers who kill innocents.”
Woodard also wrote a "memorial suite" for neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce in 2002, following his unexpected death.
More recently, Woodard raised eyebrows again with comments about Nueva Germania, a failed 19th-century Aryan colony in Paraguay founded by the sister of Friedrich Nietzsche. He reportedly told SF Gate that he was “drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle.”
Despite all this, Woodard has denied that he is a right-wing, white supremisist.
However, for some reason, Woodard briefly became the single most translated subject on Wikipedia, with articles about him in 335 different languages, surpassing even the likes of “dog,” “Jesus,” and “sex.”
It turned out that someone had been using AI to rig the system in Woodard’s favour.
According to Grnrchst’s August 9 report in The Signpost, Wikipedia’s volunteer-run internal newspaper, the surge of multilingual articles was the result of a years-long manipulation campaign involving up to 200 user accounts and countless proxy IPs.
It began in 2015, when accounts started peppering other articles from “Brown pelican” to “Pliers” with references to Woodard, usually citing self-published material. By 2017, the campaign escalated to creating new Woodard articles in different languages at a rate of one every six days. Most were bare-bones stubs, cranked out using what appears to have been machine translation.
The push evolved again in late 2021. Over 183 Wikipedia accounts, each created with a generic name and following the same editing pattern, added articles about Woodard across various language editions. Each account performed minor edits to other entries before and after creating the Woodard page, presumably to avoid suspicion.
Grnrchst reckons the purpose was to “spread photos of and information on Woodard to as many articles as possible” while hiding the coordinated nature of the effort. They believe Woodard himself, or someone close to him, orchestrated the spam to inflate his online reputation.
After the report landed, its global moderators deleted 235 Woodard articles from smaller language editions with few active editors. Larger communities axed another 80, and dozens of accounts were banned. Only 20 articles remain, including the English version, which makes no mention of the scandal.