The Article in the Most Languages
72 comments
·August 9, 2025NobodyNada
philipwhiuk
I see the defense on that context that admins aren't really mods when practically speaking they do act like mods by closing discussions - in theory this is when "Wikipedia has reached an opinion". In practice it is very easy for it to be when it has reached their opinion.
bbor
I could've sworn I remembered such a post, thank you so much for vindicating my hunch! At the time I figured there wasn't much harm in it, but in hindsight it's obvious that the absurd number of translations was the just smoke stemming from a self-promotion fire.
Props to whatever HackerNewsian (YCombinist?) took the time to chase all this down and do this fascinating writeup! You will be remembered in /r/TodayILearned posts every few months for many decades to come, no doubt.
colbyn
I thought this was referring to articles as in the part of speech (i.e. there are nouns, verbs, but also article like “a” or “the”) given the title and something spanning across languages… I wonder what his exact thought process was that motivated all that effort?
Muromec
that was my expectation as well, because mosyt languages dont have a concept of articles
ks2048
According to one count, 32% of languages don't have articles (although only based on 620 languages. 198 / 620).
dhosek
What I think is wild is that Indo-European languages have developed articles at least four times: in Greek (apparently from a weak demonstrative) with only the definite article, in Romance languages from vulgar Latin with both definite and indefinite articles, distinctly in Romanian where only the definite article exists as an enclitic (suffixed to the noun), and in some, but not all, Germanic languages, perhaps under the influence of vulgar Latin, but I’ve not been able to trace it in my meagre attempts to research the topic.
latexr
This is not interesting than the title initially suggests. It’s not merely a curiosity, but an investigation:
> 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.
decimalenough
Quite the contrary, the story is rather fascinating. (Or did you mean to say "more interesting"?)
If you want even more gruesome details, the story of how this all unraveled plus all sorts of info about Woodard, a positively creepy while supremacist, can be found on the English article's talk page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:David_Woodard/Archive_1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:David_Woodard
And with this anomaly removed, the list of articles in the most languages is back to what you'd expect: the top 10 is all large countries and Wikipedia itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikiped...
latexr
> Or did you mean to say "more interesting"?
I did, yes, that was a typo. I did notice it after the edit window was closed but the submission hadn’t had any traction so it felt silly to reply to my own comment to correct it.
Glad the submission was resurrected, I think it deserves it. My original comment was precisely to convince people to give it a read.
ViscountPenguin
Some of these are still quite suspicious imo. "True Jesus Church", a church of a few million people ranking above Jesus?
madcaptenor
It also ranks above Christianity itself.
Another suspicious one on that list: the city of Kurów in Poland, population 2,725.
drdeca
Though, if you restrict to just people, then, surprisingly, Corbin Bleu is #20 .
opan
My first thought reading this was "who's Corbin Bleu?", but I guess that's how they get you. Next I'd check the article and contribute to its popularity (by views anyway). Similar to Distrowatch where you curiously click the most obscure distros near the top of the rankings to see what they are, which increases their rank even more.
brabel
So they only got caught because they were too efficient in their scheme and rose to number 1 in translations. How many more schemes go unnoticed? Not saying Wikipedia is not doing a great job, just saying that there is probably a lot of such schemes and that it seems nearly impossible to stop them all. It’s sad that a lot of people don’t want the truth to be available, at least when it concerns themselves, they want you to only know what they think you should, like on their Instagram.
ks2048
So, should the David Woodard article have a section about this?
kjellsbells
This may be a "well, of course it's that way" observation to some, but: the article on X in wikipedia is typically quite different in one language than another. So you can get interesting insights by reading about X in different languages.
For example, the French article about David Hockney has a lovely Francophone twist in that the first few lines point out that he lived in Normandy for a few years, whereas Emglish Wikipedia buries the fact deep in the page. The page for VLC has a photo of the lead dev in the French page but no discussion of the plugin architecture. And so on. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to assume that the pages in some languages might be particularly strong if the topic plays a bigger role in the culture than in the English-speaking world.
The-Bus
It's also interesting to see what decisions editors have made about animals. In English, for example, the article for the African elephant[1] is just the animal's name.
In Italian, Spanish, and Tagalog it's the scientific name of the animal.
This makes sense in languages (like Spanish) where an animal may have a lot of different names depending on the country, region, or dialect. If you look at the article for Pig[2], you'll see at least fifteen names listed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant [2] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sus_scrofa_domestica
nickm12
...and I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids!
I find it interesting that the whole scheme might not have been noticed had he been more modest and not tried to translate the pages into rare languages. We don't know the motive, but if it was self-promotion, these additional languages were presumably of negligible value yet risked the scheme.
indigo945
On the contrary, it's precisely by "risking" the scheme that the self-promotion became effective.
It's quite unlikely for anybody to stumble upon any given English-language Wikipedia article by chance, given that there's literally billions of them now - therefore, the promotional value of having a Wikipedia article on something even in a popular language is negligible. However, by spamming all the Wikipedias, and having this "scheme" discovered, Woodard created a situation where he is widely reported on as the artist that spammed Wikipedia, and has therefore received the five minutes of fame that he so desperately wanted.
If he had stuck to spamming the English Wikipedia, would he have ended up on the frontpage of HN?
shermantanktop
This was clearly the endgame all along.
Quietly having all these articles might be personally satisfying in some way, but his obvious appetite for fame or notoriety points toward him wanting the scheme to be exposed. In fact I would not be entirely surprised if he somehow instigated the discovery of his activities.
netsharc
Ironically now this person has become notorious for Wiki-pollution. Since he's an "artist", he can claim it was an art project.
Sadly because it's 2025, he has a lot of competition for the award of "most insufferable douchebag".
cpa
Shameless plug about a little game I wrote a few years ago, about guessing which pages exist in the most languages in wikipedia:
Bengalilol
I have great respect for and am impressed by the work that has been done. I also appreciate the explanations in this article. One question remains (perhaps related to my limited knowledge of Wikipedia’s processes): why is there no reference to this work on Woodard’s page?
decimalenough
"Original research" is a cardinal sin on Wikipedia, meaning it's not eligible for inclusion in Wikipedia unless news outlets outside Wikipedia pick up the story and start publishing stories about it.
dhosek
I’ve always thought that the criteria for inclusion on Wikipedia should simply be: is it true and is it verifiable. All the other criteria, notoriety, no original research, etc. really shouldn’t matter.
mobeets
I totally agree but unfortunately it really is one of the fundamental laws of wikipedia. To me this becomes especially silly when editing math wiki articles, where you might be tempted to connect mathematical concepts (eg with a few lines of algebra), but writing this yourself in a wiki article is not allowed unless you can find a link to an external source making the same derivation!
BrenBarn
Fascinating! A detective story for our age.
asimovDev
What a coincidence. Just yesterday i watched a youtube video about Corbin Bleu being the 3rd most translated article on wikipedia after Jesus and Barack Obama. Not surprised to see that it was a one user effort once again
nickpsecurity
We could probably add it to multilingual, training sets for A.I..
Previously, the ones trained on a thousand or more languages by Meta and Wycliffe used the Bible since it's the only complex, rich message translated to most, human languages. Which God said would happen to His authentic message. :)
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/meta-used-bibl...
_3u10
[flagged]
This came up on HN a few months ago, when someone posted a list of most-translated articles and Woodard was at the top: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031697
It looks like a user in the HN thread noticed the irregularities on the Italian Wikipedia [0] and started the deletion discussion [1] that the article credits with kickstarting this investigation.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44035222
[1]: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pagine_da_cancellare...