Quick—what are the top entries in the category "Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages"?
The answer is countries.
Turkey tops the list with Wikipedia entries in 332 different languages, while the US is second with 327 and Japan is third with 324. Other common words make their appearance as one looks down the list. "Dog" (275 languages) tops "cat" (273). Jesus (274) beats "Adolf Hitler" (242). And all of them beat "sex" (122), which is also bested by "fever," "Chiang Kai-Shek," and the number "13."
But if you had looked at the list a couple months back, something would have been different. Turkey, the US, and Japan were still in the same order near the top of the leaderboard, but the number one slot was occupied by an unlikely contender: David Woodard, who had Wikipedia entries in 335 different languages.
You ... haven't heard of David Woodard?
Woodard is a composer who infamously wrote a "prequiem"—that is, a "pre requiem"—in 2001 for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who had murdered 168 people with a truck bomb. The piece was to be performed at a church near McVeigh's execution site in Terre Haute, Indiana, then recorded and played on the radio so that McVeigh would have a chance to hear it.
According to the LA Times, which spoke to the composer, "Woodard’s hope in performing the 12-minute piece, he said, is to 'cause the soul of Timothy McVeigh to go to heaven.'" According to BBC coverage from the time, Woodard "says McVeigh is '33 and nearly universally despised at the time of his execution'—like Jesus Christ."
Hoo boy.
Woodard also had a scheme to help save Nueva Germania, an 1880s colony in Paraguay that was designed to let German culture flourish away from the influence of European Jews. Friedrich Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, was one of the founding colonists. Elisabeth's husband killed himself as the colony collapsed; she returned to Europe. (Lest you subscribe to the common view that Nietzsche was himself some kind of crude racist, know that he loathed his brother-in-law's racism and cut ties with his sister when she left Europe. Unfortunately, due to his later madness, he eventually ended up under her care for several years, and she edited his works after his death in ways that made him look more like a proto-Nazi.) Some descendants of the colonists still live at Nueva Germania, but the colony is now poor and run-down, and Elisabeth's house is almost gone.
"As an artist who is fed up with much of the pretentious nonsense that has come to define Western culture," Woodard told SF Gate, "I am drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle."
So what was a guy like this doing with articles in 335 different languages? Inquiring minds want to know, which is why people have posted questions to sites like Reddit over the last year asking about the Woodard situation.