After a discount in exercise, issues ramped up once more in 2021, as IP addresses from all over the world began creating Woodard references and articles as soon as extra. For example, “addresses from Canada, Germany, Indonesia, the UK and different locations added some trivia about Woodard to all 15 Wikipedia articles in regards to the calea ternifolia.”
Then issues bought “extra subtle.” From December 2021 by means of June 2025, 183 articles had been created about Woodard, every in a unique language’s Wikipedia and every by a singular account. These accounts adopted a sample of habits: They had been “created, usually with a reasonably generic title, and made a person web page with a single picture on it. They then made dozens of minor edits to unrelated articles, earlier than creating an article about David Woodard, then making a dozen or so extra minor edits earlier than disappearing off the platform.”
Grnrchst believes that each one the exercise was meant to “create as many articles about Woodard as potential, and to unfold pictures of and data on Woodard to as many articles as potential, whereas hiding that exercise as a lot as potential… I got here to imagine that David Woodard himself, or somebody near him, had been working this community of accounts and IP addresses for the needs of cynical self-promotion.”
After the Grnrchst report, Wikipedia’s international stewards eliminated 235 articles on Woodard from Wikipedia situations with few customers or directors. Bigger Wikipedias had been free to make their very own neighborhood selections, and so they eliminated one other 80 articles and banned quite a few accounts.
“A full decade of devoted self-promotion by a person community has been undone in just a few weeks by our neighborhood,” Grnrchst famous.
In the long run, simply 20 articles about Woodard stay, similar to this one in English, which doesn’t point out the controversy.
We had been unable to get in contact with Woodard, whose private web site is password-protected and solely accessible “by invitation.”
May the entire thing be some form of “artwork challenge,” with the actual payoff being publicity and being written about? Maybe. However regardless of the motive behind the decade-long effort to spice up Woodard on Wikipedia, the incident reminds us simply how a lot effort some persons are prepared to place into polluting open or public-facing initiatives for their very own ends.
