I am absolutely baffled as to why this is the case. I have to imagine some kind of "astroturfed" effort by Woodard or a fan to spread his name?
Though, I'm not sure if the Good Article assessment is used in many languages. Maybe someone could slap some LLM on it to do a quick assessment of which are likely to be GA.
According to the wikidata, there are no articles for the United States in whatever languages VEP, GUR, and UR are, but:
https://vep.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikan_%C3%9Chtenzoittud_Va...
https://ur.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA...
https://gur.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_America
Ended up being fairly easy to look for - I compared the David Woodard list to the United States list and found instances where it claimed there was an article for the former but not the latter. Most David Woodard articles have a link to where he was born (United States), so an easy crosscheck.
Though VE seems to be an outlier where there is a Woodward but not United States article: https://ve.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Woodard
It saddens me that we will probably see the end of wikipedia soon.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been fined multiple times by Russian courts for example, it's just not in Russia's jurisdiction.
I expect the slow ramp of anti wikipedia rhetoric, which will all be plausible to the credulous, until public sentiment is swayed enough to strip their protections.
Now that college students are using completely unsourced, uninspectable chatgpt to write papers even that cohort won't protest.
And then instead of having a messy but checkable and certainly criticizable open repository of all human knowledge we will have opaque bs producers that are impossible to criticize because it will show eqch person what they want to see with no room for open debate or discussion and humanity will lose any attempt at curating shared, open touchstones of truth and fact.
I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do. So I'll leave it up to you.
I’ve long had the philosophy that the world has enough problems and that it’s not my place to add to them, but this philosophy also gave me a motivation to move mountains for solutions - and would be upset when I inevitably couldn’t. I think this perspective has been the best middle ground between what I’m capable of, and what I want to accomplish.
- Elon Musk
Fascists from all around the globe are waging a war on truth, and Wikipedia is a major hurdle to their plans they're having trouble dealing with. That anti-Wikipedia rhetoric is ramping up in countries that used to care about reality but recently succumbed to right-wing populism.
Where is this doom and gloom coming from?
Wikipedia isn't ending. Legal challenges can be dealt with as they always have, and in the worst-case scenario the org can move countries if necessary. I can't even imagine why you "expect the slow ramp of anti wikipedia rhetoric". Where is this coming from? Even if something happened to the org, some other org can clone it -- content and infrastructure and all.
And college students still have to cite their sources, and I don't even know what that has to do with Wikipedia, which isn't something any college student should be citing directly anyways.
Your pessimism doesn't seem to be based on any kind of facts, unless I'm missing something here? Especially with the inaccuracies of LLM's, people continue to care about correct knowledge, and so people will continue to use and update Wikipedia. Heck, LLM's may even make Wikipedia more important than it's ever been before.
Yes, the slow ramp of anti Wikipedia rhetoric is a documented fact, in both Russia and the USA: https://gizmodo.com/trump-doj-threatens-wikipedias-nonprofit...
Fascinating post.
A very active member of their community armed with a translator, very probably.
One of the favorite areas is CDPs and really small towns. You can pick up gazettes and databases full of places that have, like, one post office or a singular train station. They may be ghost towns or mining towns or something. Then you just vomit them all into individual articles.
There is some debate about the notability, accuracy, and utility of such articles. Many are forever doomed to be stubs, just from a lack of real documentation about them. Often people will find that the place never really existed per se despite its very real entry in the database.
333: David Woodard
275: Michael Jackson
274: Jesus
252: Donald Trump, who is very happy he's ahead of...
251: Barack Obama
250: Ronald Reagan
242: Adolf Hitler
239: Leonardo da Vinci
234: Isaac Newton
233: Confucius
230: William Shakespeare
229: Albert Einstein, Vladimir Putin, Nelson Mandela
225: Joe Biden
224: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
223: Muhammad
222: Aristotle, Basshunter (Swedish musician)
218: Johann Sebastian Bach
217: Plato
215: Julius Caesar
213: Napoleon
212: The Beatles (not bigger than Jesus), Corbin Bleu (American actor and singer), Alexander the Great
211: George W. Bush, Ludwig van Beethoven, Vincent Van Gogh
210: Vladimir Lenin, Michelangelo
209: Christopher Columbus, Buddha
206: Augustus, Karl Marx
205: Charles Darwin, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Elizabeth II
204: Pablo Picasso
203: Abraham Lincoln, Galileo Galilei, Mahatma Gandhi
202: Joseph Stalin
201: Socrates
200: Salvador Dalí
I generated this list by hand, so it's possible I missed some, especially one-named people. Most of these seem legitimate, but I do wonder what David Woodard, Basshunter, and Corbin Bleu did.
esafak•3h ago
edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1ce1f74/why_does...
ffsoftboiled•3h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ob0f1kCtOM
soupfordummies•3h ago
This what you meant to post?
Centigonal•1h ago