Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/Disinformation report

Disinformation report

The article in the most languages

By Grnrchst

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.

Who is David Woodard?

Born in California in 1964, David Woodard first came to prominence during the 1990s, when he began building replicas of the Dreamachine, which brought him into contact with artists such as William S. Burroughs. He developed a style of music which he called a "prequiem", designed to be played before someone’s death, and premiered his technique for the execution of domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh. Reports from this period in his life depict him as an eccentric figure: Tracy Manzer, a journalist for the Press-Telegram, reported on a requiem he performed for a pelican, which she said had "smacked of bullshit"; Rick Castro described Woodard as a "zombie-like figure" who had handed Castro white supremacist pamphlets unprompted; and Steve Lowery of the OC Weekly depicted him as a man who desperately wanted to be famous and who was willing to lie extensively about himself in order to achieve that aim.

Not long after McVeigh’s death in 2001, Woodard began regularly visiting the Paraguayan settlement of Nueva Germania, originally founded by German white supremacists. He expressed a fascination with the colony's eugenicist roots, and in an interview with the SFGate, he outlined his plans to build a Dreamachine factory in the former home of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. It was his writings about the colony and his exhibition of the Dreamachine at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire that gained the attention of German Wikipedia editors, who created an article about him in August 2010 and kept it updated over the subsequent years. On 6 March 2014, an article about Woodard was published on the English Wikipedia. Around this time, Woodard himself moved to Prague and later married fellow musician Sonja Vectomov.

Woodard's first photograph

Woodard, pictured in Seattle in October 2013, by BarunH

On 11 March 2014, an account by the name of BarunH (talk · contribs · count) was created. A few days later, they uploaded to Wikicommons a photograph of David Woodard, apparently taken by BarunH in Seattle in October 2013. The photo is a closeup, taken from a low angle, apparently quite close to the subject; it more closely resembles a selfie than a photograph by another person. Two hours later, a French IP address added the photograph and made a number of changes to the English Wikipedia article. This address was later globally blocked as an open proxy, in what will become a recurring theme. On 5 May 2015, BarunH uploaded what they claimed to be their own photograph of Judy Nylon. Mere minutes later, an IP address from Atlanta, Georgia (another globally-blocked open proxy) added the image to Nylon’s article. Later that year, BarunH started to make a foray into editing the English Wikipedia, with a number of edits to an article about the Czech Lute.

Introducing: Swmmng

Photograph of Sonja Vectomov, taken in Czechia by Swmmng in September 2016

On 19 June 2015, an account by the name of Swmmng (talk · contribs · count) was created. Their first edit was to an article about a book written by Woodard’s close friend and publisher Christian Kracht. They then embarked on writing a series of articles about Czech artists, including Woodard's in-laws (Ivan, Saša, Sonja and Vladimír Večtomov, and Jana Andrsová), while making occasional edits to Woodard's own article and creating a Wikicommons category for him. In February 2016, they wrote an article about "Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia" and were kind enough to upload a photo they had taken of the original sheet music (held in the Czech Museum of Music) with their Sony DSC-WX80 camera.

Throughout the year, they continued doing genuinely good work improving the English Wikipedia’s coverage of Czech art. They also made some edits to David Woodard’s article; on one occasion they attempted to remove a talk page complaint, which had pointed out that the words "Pure Aryan" had deceptively been removed from the title of the San Francisco Gate article about Woodard’s expedition to Nueva Germania; these words would be left out of the source in every translation of the article.

On 13 November 2016, Swmnng created an article about Woodard's wife Sonja Vectomov. They also uploaded a photograph of Vectomov, which they had taken with their Sony DSC-WX80 on 21 September 2016. Vectomov’s hair and outfit are identical to what’s seen in the photo-op of her for her own record company, taken on the occasion of her debut album on 23 September 2016. Swmmng later declared in a DYK nomination that they “shot the photo—on my own volition, not for hire—in Czech Republic”.

Woodard's first translations

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 (talk · contribs · count) 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 (talk · contribs · count) 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 (talk · contribs · count) 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.

Swmmng's mass translation campaign

Swmmng's activity on the English Wikipedia had slowly tapered off after creating the article about Vectomov, largely making minor edits to articles about banking. Meanwhile, they had shifted the focus of their activities elsewhere. On the Czech Wikipedia, they created an article about the "Feraliminální lykantropizér". They also began translating their article about Vectomov onto other Wikipedias, starting with Spanish and French in February 2017, then later doing a Finnish translation in September 2018 and a Vietnamese translation in December 2020. They were also helped out by a (now globally-blocked) IP editor in Hong Kong for the Chinese translation, an IP in Sweden for the Italian translation, and a user called Gasprinskiy (talk · contribs · count) for the Crimean Tatar translation. You would expect that, as an editor with an interest in Czech artists based in the Czech Republic, Swmmng would have created an article on the Czech Wikipedia, but no such article was ever published.

Swmmng's work on articles about Vectomov was small beer compared to what they had planned for David Woodard. Between August 2017 and March 2019, Swmmng created articles about David Woodard in at least 92 different languages, creating a new article every 6 days on average. This count excludes a couple of occasions in early April 2018, when they apparently neglected to sign into their account and created the articles for the Slovak and Volapük Wikipedias using IP addresses based in Prague. They started off with Latin-script European languages, but quickly branched out into other families and scripts from all corners of the globe, even writing articles in constructed languages; they also went from writing full-length article translations, to low-effort stub articles, which would go on to make up the vast majority of all translations (easily 90% or more). This amount of translations across so many different languages would either imply this person is one of the most advanced polyglots in human history, or they were spamming machine translations; the latter is more likely.

In December 2018, something quite interesting happened, as Swmmng’s translation efforts began to be supplemented by translated articles from several IP addresses from around the world. This led to some peculiar oddities, with a few examples including (but not limited to): a South Korean IP translating an article into Pennsylvania Dutch; a range of (now globally-blocked) Finnish IPs translating articles into Nahuatl, Extremaduran and Kirundi; and a range of (now globally-blocked) Prague-based IP translations into anything from Srnanan Tongo to Zhuang. With most of the larger Wikipedias already covered by Swmmng, this period shifted in focus towards the smaller platforms with fewer active users and minoritised languages.

Swmmng’s last article was on the Avar Wikipedia on 6 March 2019; some five days later, on 11 March, the IP edits which had been creating multiple articles per day also abruptly stopped. What happened? That same day, the user PiRSquared17 (talk · contribs · count) sent Swmmng a message on Wikimedia Meta asking them about it. It seemed that this may have spooked them, because after this, only three new articles were created by IP addresses; one for Bulgarian in April and two more for Zulu and Aymara in December. Swmmng quietly deleted the message from their page in January 2025.

After creating 24 articles on as many different Wikipedias, the IP translations stopped completely for more than a year. In 2020, a couple new articles were created through overt machine translations in the Wu Chinese Wikipedia and the Somali Wikipedia (the latter resulting in the editor being blocked), but these appear to be unaffiliated with the overall push.

New photographs

Photograph of Woodard, taken in April 2020 by BarunH

On 26 February 2017, the user CWells (talk · contribs · count) 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).

On 20 April 2020, BarunH uploaded another close-up photograph of David Woodard, which they had taken two weeks earlier with their Leica Q2 camera. Given this was one month into the COVID-19 lockdowns in the Czech Republic, this implies that BarunH was especially close with Woodard. They were proud enough of the photograph to quickly add it onto Wikidata, pushing it to every Wikipedia article that used a wikidata infobox, and to specifically add it to the Kazakh Wikipedia article. The new photo was then swiftly added to scores of Woodard's other articles, by dozens of (now globally-blocked) IP addresses based in Hong Kong. From then on, almost every newly-created article about Woodard came with this photograph. It eventually made its way onto the English Wikipedia, on 10 July 2021, when it was added by the user BardRapt (talk · contribs · count). This user's account was created in August 2016, and has mostly made minor edits to articles about religion, philosophy and literature, while also making large edits to the English Wikipedia article on David Woodard (effectively dominating the page for years).

On 30 July 2020, Judgtastic came back to Wikicommons to upload a photograph of David Woodard and William S. Burroughs, taken by the photographer John Aes-Nihil in 1997. Judgtastic claimed to be the copyright holder of the photograph and uploaded it as their own work, although 1904.CC (talk · contribs · count) later confirmed that Aes-Nihil had not given permission for it to be uploaded here and requested it be deleted. Judgtastic added it to the article on Burroughs, hiding the addition among several minor edits which they marked as "mce". From September 2020 to August 2022, IP addresses from across the globe added the image to articles about Burroughs and Woodard, as well as those of the Dreamachine, and its creators Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville; they would often even remove preexisting photographs of Burroughs by himself or with other people, in favour of this image of Burroughs and Woodard. In the middle of all this, on 17 January 2021, Swmmng added the image to the Turkish Wikipedia article on Woodard; their edit summary was identical to previous IP additions. The addition of this image to articles continued into 2023 and 2024, although in this period, it was added exclusively by IP addresses located in Prague.

Interestingly, after five years of inactivity, Špačkovití (the creator of Woodard’s Czech Wikipedia article) reappeared on 6 June 2021 to upload a photo they had taken of a blueprint by Czech architect František Plesnivý; like BarunH’s 2020 photo of Woodard, it was taken with a Leica Q2 camera.

Meanwhile, in August 2021, Judgtastic uploaded a close-up photograph they had taken of David Woodard in 2018, with a Nikon Z7 camera. The exif data shows the author as "JA-N", the same initials as that of John Aes-Nihil, an "aesthetic nihilist" photographer and filmmaker who worked with Woodard during the 1990s and 2000s, and who has been creatively inactive since 2015. Like the previously uploaded close-up photographs of Woodard, allegedly taken by a different photographer, this was also taken from a low angle, with Woodard in profile and staring into the middle-distance; they all strongly resemble selfies.

Second mass-translation campaign

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 (talk · contribs · count) 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 (talk · contribs · count) 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.

The little things

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.

Conclusions

After going through all 335 articles on David Woodard, I only found 6 that were organically created by preexisting editors: first the German article in 2010 and the English article in 2014; then, after almost 50 new articles by Swmmng, users of the Farsi, Arabic and Punjabi Wikipedias took it upon themselves to publish their own articles in mid-2018; in May 2020, an editor on the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia also added their own article. Every single other article was created by Swmmng, IP proxies, or unique single-purpose accounts.

It was after discovering the unique account creations that I concluded the situation could no longer be charitably put down to one over-zealous editor and some disconnected IP editors. This editing pattern clearly displayed a long-term intent to create as many articles about Woodard as possible, and to spread photos of and information on Woodard to as many articles as possible, while hiding that activity as much as possible. And it worked for a long time, up until the number of inter-wiki links got too high for people not to question it.

I considered many possible explanations during the investigation, but after enough time, only one made any sense. I came to believe that David Woodard himself, or someone close to him, had been operating this network of accounts and IP addresses for the purposes of cynical self-promotion. I concluded that the accounts of BarunH, BardRapt, CWells, Eça Sá-Carneiro, FlenBotoz, Judgtastic, Swmmng and Špačkovití (among others) were all under the direct operation of this network, judging by their similar focus, interests and crossover in activities, as well as an identical style of edit summaries between them. The connections were later confirmed in a sockpuppet investigation.

Others elsewhere speculated about Swmmng being related to the American music company of the same name, but throughout the investigation I remained unconvinced by this hypothesis and believed the name to be a coincidence (the name is "swimming" with the vowels removed and the company's logo is a rubber duck). The account Swmmng's basis in Prague, its specific interests and closeness with Sonja Vectomov, and its deep focus on Woodard, pointed closer to it being Woodard’s own account rather than a PR company working for him. I later reached out to the SWMMNG company and its founder confirmed that they were not involved, nor did they even know who Woodard was until then.

I didn’t want to speculate on the motive for doing this, but I thought all of it had displayed a long-term abuse of hundreds of wiki projects, a wanton violation of several global wiki policies (not least a failure to disclose conflicts of interest and an abuse of multiple accounts), and a flagrant disrespect for the languages and the time of other Wikimedians. It was the latter that particularly irked me, especially after a user from the Tumbuka Wikipedia reported that they had initially felt "hope and joy that a small community had then gained another native editor", before finding out that this account had been a promotional sockpuppet.

All of this was a more-or-less quantitative investigation (you can see the complete spreadsheets in this Cryptpad file), and more qualitative investigations into articles on a case-by-case basis were still needed after publication. The reliability of information in articles about David Woodard, and even his notability as an artist, was called into question by this process. Aside from what I outlined here, I noticed other cases of suspicious activity across all of these articles, which may indicate more accounts and proxies that I am not yet aware of.

Taking action

The question I was left with after this investigation was what to do about all of it. Unfortunately, the scale of the problem implied that it would continue if we didn’t stop it or if we stopped paying attention to it for long enough.

Before publishing my full report, I posted a preliminary report to Wikimedia Meta. The global stewards, responsible for smaller Wikipedias that did not have the resources to handle this individually, then deleted no fewer than 235 articles and globally blocked all of the single-purpose accounts they found. I was also heartened to see an immediate bottom-up response, with the Slovenian Wikipedia (among others I’m sure) opening a deletion discussion for their own David Woodard article.

When I published the full report on 30 June 2025, I recommended that we: globally block all of the accounts we knew to be in this network; purge all information about David Woodard, across all projects and articles, that we could not verify to come from relevant, reliable and independent sources; and rewrite the articles from the ground-up in accordance with reliable, independent sources (among other recommendations).

With help from other users and admins, I began to reach out to Wikipedia projects where Woodard articles remained, informing them about what had happened so they could themselves make the decision on how to handle it. I hoped that the autonomous and decentralised structure of Wikipedia's projects would allow each community to make decisions that were right for them. My belief from the beginning was that the process was more important than the outcomes, which have varied based on the wills of each individual project. In some cases, discussions resulted in a unanimous consensus to delete the articles. In others, local admins took unilateral action to delete the articles. Some projects saw fit to improve the articles, rather than delete them. And in a couple cases, editors of other Wikipedias criticised my report on the matter. A number of these discussions are still ongoing.

After a full month of coordinated, decentralised action, the number of articles about Mr. Woodard was reduced from 335 articles to 32. A full decade of dedicated self-promotion by an individual network has been undone in only a few weeks by our community.