Wikipedia Volunteer Uncovers Decade-Long Campaign That Created 335 Articles About One Composer
- Reference: 0178720558
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/18/0953228/wikipedia-volunteer-uncovers-decade-long-campaign-that-created-335-articles-about-one-composer
- Source link:
Wikipedia stewards removed 235 articles from smaller wikis. Larger Wikipedia communities banned numerous accounts and deleted 80 additional articles. Twenty Woodard articles remain. Grnrchst called it "the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history."
[1] https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/08/why-was-the-most-translated-wikipedia-article-in-the-world-about-a-lover-of-aryan-culture/
Check out the Wikipedia article in English on him (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep up somewhat with classical music and while Woodard graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music, he isn't anybody I've ever heard of in the classical scene. He seems to be pretty good at promoting himself, or trying to do so. He's written a few works you've never heard of because a lot of them are controversial tributes to people who don't really deserve tributes. He denies being a racist, but he seems to really lean hard on the pro-Nazi side of politics and he made friends with Timothy McVeigh according to the article.
Re: (Score:2)
If he's racist does that no longer make him notable? This stinks of cancel culture. And Wikipedia isn't running out of bits, there's really no good reason to remove accurate information at all whether it was put there for selfish reasons or not.
so what (Score:4, Insightful)
so what's the point? were the articles bad, had no facts, or did they violate any custom-made-on-the-spot rule from the editors?
If the guy is posting his biography in 92 different languages and hasn't done malicious edits or any other foul play why would you delete the articles?
or is it about neckbeard pride? It's very well known that wikipedia editors are a special kind of asshole, right up there with StackOverflow editors.
also editors are as biased as anyone else. Every wiki article about Argentina, especially argentinan politics, has been co-opted by peronist editors (financed by the kirchner government) and the tldr of every subject is "the Nation was founded in 2003 when Kirchner created it from the dust of the old argentina destroyed by liberalism".
Re: (Score:3)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] While its not against the rules to write articles about yourself, they must meet the neutrality principle no matter who writes it. I'd assume since some of the articles were left up, the ones removed were not neutral.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:An_article_about_yourself_isn't_necessarily_a_good_thing
That they know of... (Score:4, Informative)
> the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history.
That they know of. I bet there are even larger ones that were better hidden.
Widespread (Score:2)
I see smaller versions of this regularly on Wikipedia. There is some term a professor cooked up regarding AI that has it's own entry. It's only been mentioned in their paper, and a couple of journal articles referencing that paper. It's been marked for deletion a handful of times but a few dozen votes causes it to stay. I'll go out on a limb and guess those votes come from the IP addresses where the professor works.
The other place you see it fairly regularly are in pages about movies and books. There will
Re: (Score:2)
I've noticed video game pages seem to often be press releases.
Specifically a game that hasn't been released yet had its page edited to have the reception page say it was released to good reviews or whatever the language is there.
Re:Portmanteau (Score:4, Funny)
> The vast majority of the time you see the word "portmanteau" on Wikipedia, the change was due to a single editor with a predilection for that word.
There's a word for that phenomenon, which I just made up: portmanteautalitarianism .
Now if you'll excuse me I have a new Wikipedia article to write.
What about the notable Michael Crawford (Score:2)
Surely the inventor of the Wall of Text deserves a Wikipedia biographical page?
[citation unsolicited] (Score:5, Funny)
"Article Status: Reverted. Reason: The editor clearly has an unhealth fixation on the subject. In fact, if the editor turned out to actually be the subject, that would actually be less inappropriate at this point."
Re:[citation unsolicited] (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I misunderstanding something here? Yes, it's (allegedly) self promotion since it *could* have been a hardcore fan doing this, which isn't great, but surely the ultimate goal for articles on Wikipedia is to have every article replicated into as many languages as possible? It's entirely possible that David Woodard (presumably) may just have been trying to make it easier for any international fans to find out more about him in their own language, and the moderators jumped to the wrong conclusion. Or is there some seach ranking system doing this somehow games, because the league table they're talking about seems to be something only Wiki contributors looking to stroke their ego or Wiki admins are even going to know about, let alone care about?
If I wanted to use Wikipedia to read up on some music artist I'd just discovered, I know I'd certainly prefer to do so in my mother tongue - English - rather than whatever native language they might speak and had an article written in, for instance. If that kind of language translation is going to be blocked, I'm not seeing how this benefits native speakers of the 315 languages (in this case) that don't make the cut.
Re: (Score:2)
> First off, from tfs, it's 92 languages.
FFS, how are you trying to pull this shit when you didn't even read TFS?
Those 92 language additions were between 2017 and 2019. The very first sentence, the one immediately prior to that mention, notes the total:
>> created articles about composer David Woodard in 335 languages.
Re: (Score:3)
For relatively obvious reasons, Wikipedia generally bans people from working on articles directly relating to themselves, such as biographies and works they've created. They're allowed to use the talk pages, and can suggest edits, but beyond that they're considered an egregious violation of the requirements for secondary sources and the NPOV.
If someone wants to publish something for their fans, their best route, as always, is to create a website, rather than editing an existing one that's expected to at lea