The Article in the Most Languages

The article in the most languages: Who is this guy? Note to readers: Some of the diffs in this article are dead links because of deletions made subsequent to writing. They have been retained to show diligence in the findings presented here. – Signpost editors In late 2024, something quite astonishing happened on Wikipedia that went by largely unnoticed. For the first time, the Wikipedia article with the greatest number of languages was not a country like the United States, nor even Wikipedia itself. This article, with 335 articles across the different Wikipedia projects at the time of writing, was about a relatively obscure artist named David Woodard. People who came across this expressed surprise, and even noticed that a large number of the articles were created by a single user by the name “Swmmng”. Upon my investigation into this oddity, 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. Woodard, pictured in Seattle in October 2013, by BarunH Photograph of Sonja Vectomov , taken in Czechia by Swmmng in September 2016 While Swmmng was busy at work on the English Wikipedia, more articles related to David Woodard and accounts interested in him began to appear. On 30 August 2015, an account called Judgtastic was created on the English Wikipedia. Like Swmmng, they were clearly interested in Czech artists; and like BarunH, they took an interest in David Woodard and Judy Nylon. On 3 March 2016, they created a Wikiquote page for David Woodard, and it was quickly expanded by IP ranges from Perth, Seoul and London. On 11 April 2016, Judgtastic created an English Wikipedia article about the "Feraliminal Lycanthropizer", a fictional machine out of David Woodard’s imagination, and kept it updated over the subsequent months. They later made other edits here and there to assorted, disconnected topics, and often inserted name drops to Woodard into other articles. They also uploaded their own photographs of Czech artists and Woodard’s "Lycanthropizer" to Wikicommons. On 17 July 2016, an account called Špačkovití was created on the Czech Wikipedia, identifying themselves as someone interested in "Czech animals, plants, architecture and people". However, they ended up writing about none of these things on the Czech Wikipedia, instead immediately deciding to write about David Woodard and nearly nothing else. They then quickly moved to the English Wikipedia, where they indulged their interests and wrote about Czech artists (including Sonja Vectomov's mother), animals and also Woodard’s friend Christian Kracht. Before the end of 2016, their activity completely stopped. On 26 August 2016, a Prague-based IP address created an article about David Woodard on the Simple English Wikipedia. A range of IP addresses (some now globally-blocked), including from Prague, Milan, London, Zurich and New York, kept the article updated over the subsequent years. One month before this article was created, Swmmng created a user page on Simple English Wikipedia, implying they had planned to create some articles there. On 18 August 2017, an account called FlenBotoz was created on the Spanish Wikipedia and immediately published a Spanish translation of David Woodard’s article. After making some edits to it, as well as a couple minor edits to articles about years, it then completely ceased activity after only a few days. Curiously, the only other activity by this account was on the English Wikipedia from June to November 2015, during which it made a handful of minor edits on articles about Czech artists. Photograph of Woodard, taken in April 2020 by BarunH On 26 February 2017, the user CWells uploaded a photograph of David Woodard and Melvin Belli, taken with a Leica S1 camera in 1996, allegedly by CWells (although it was later deleted as a copyright violation). It was almost immediately added to Belli’s English Wikipedia article by a Prague-based IP address. Then, over the following month, it was added to other articles about Belli and Mark Twain’s poem "The War Prayer", by an IP range in the Czech town of Novy Bydzov (near Vectomov’s home city of Hradec Králové). After two years, IP proxies and the user Judgtastic added the photo to Belli's Arabic, Afar and Esperanto Wikipedia articles. And even in February 2025, a Prague-based IP added the photo to Belli's Indonesian Wikipedia article. Previously, CWells had also uploaded a 2008 photograph they had taken with a Leica C-Lux camera of Woodard at Cabaret Voltaire, together with his friend Christian Kracht and convicted terrorist Ma Anand Sheela; over the years, it was added to the various articles on Cabaret Voltaire, Kracht and Sheela by a series of IP addresses (largely from New York, London and Czechia). In early March 2021, IP addresses began creating articles on David Woodard again, for the first time in over a year. In June, the Woodard-related IP activities began branching out; IP addresses from Canada, Germany, Indonesia, the UK and other places added some trivia about Woodard to all 15 Wikipedia articles about the calea ternifolia (or calea zacatechichi). This was followed in July by another surge of new articles about Woodard, created by IP addresses mostly centred on Vaenersborg, Sweden, with a smattering of other locations. December 2021 marked the beginning of the most sophisticated phase of the mass-translations. From then until June 2025, 183 articles (1 roughly every 7 days) were created across as many Wikipedias, each by different unique accounts. All of these accounts were functionally identical. The accounts were created, often with a fairly generic name, and made a user page with a single image on it. They then made dozens of minor edits to unrelated articles, before creating an article about David Woodard, then making a dozen or so more minor edits before disappearing off the platform. The extent to which all of these accounts' modus operandi was the same can’t be overstated, with the only real divergence being the exact number of minor edits they made. Were this editing campaign to have gone on unimpeded, the David Woodard article would have spread to every single active Wikipedia project by the end of summer 2025. This was only stopped from becoming the case by the action of the Italian Wikipedia project, which noticed the irregularities in the article’s creation, decided to delete it, and even ensured it remained deleted after an account attempted to recreate it. The Polish Wikipedia had also noticed that one of Swmmng’s articles was gobbledygook, and moved it to a draft page in user space; but less than a week later, another user by the name of M. Hoene-Wroński showed up to recreate it. On 3 May 2025, this same user uploaded a 2004 photograph of Woodard in Nueva Germania, claiming to be the copyright holder; over the rest of the month, IP addresses from all across the world (helped by Eça Sá-Carneiro on the Portuguese Wikipedia) began adding it to articles about Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Nueva Germania. This same photograph had previously been deleted from Wikicommons due to missing licensing, apparently having lacked permission for its distribution from the brothers pictured alongside Woodard. The reupload has now also been deleted. When going through some of the articles edited by the various Woodard-focused accounts and IP proxies, following a lead on even small changes often showed a larger pattern. In some cases, it would be Judgtastic inserting trivia about Woodard into Kurt Cobain's English and French Wikipedia biographies, which would be quickly followed by IP proxies and other Woodard-focused accounts like Eça Sá-Carneiro inserting it into the biography in other languages (e.g. Spanish; Portuguese). On the English Wikipedia alone, Woodard’s name was inserted into no fewer than 93 articles (including Pliers; Brown pelican and Bundesautobahn 38), often referencing self-published sources by Woodard himself; this was a pattern that played out across many other Wikipedia projects as well (e.g. French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.). I would have included more examples, but I was not able to follow every single lead, or this report would never have gotten published. One of the small changes was something I don't think most people would notice in isolation, but quickly forms a pattern when you look into it. In 2023, Woodard’s middle name, "James", began to pop up in the new articles published by the unique accounts. At the end of that year, in December, "James" was first added to the English Wikipedia article by BardRapt. A range of Prague-based IP addresses and unique single-purpose accounts followed throughout early 2024, adding "James" into dozens of preexisting articles, sometimes alongside the "Woodard" ogg file uploaded by Swmmng in 2019 (which has likewise been spread throughout many Wikipedias by IPs, mostly based in Prague). In the middle of all this, on 16 March 2024, “James” was added to the Portuguese article by Swmmng, whose Woodard-related activities had been largely dormant for a couple years.