This guy does an excellent breakdown. But the TLDW: possibly a Saudi superfan,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ob0f1kCtOM

Yeah, some account "Swmmng" has created a lot of these pages. Interestingly this is also the name of some kind of music/artist agency.

It has been known to happen https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/aetmh9...

A lot of them seem to be stubs with only one line of content. Not very hard to translate "David James Woodard (born April 6, 1964) is an American conductor and writer" passably into 300-some languages.

The really amazing thing is that there are more articles about this guy than about Wikipedia. You'd think the first thing the editors of any Wikipedia would do is make an article about Wikipedia.

I checked the Malayalam page for David Woodard as I have native proficiency and also when it comes to translation to Malayalam, even the finer engines are patchy at best. Firstly, there is an alert at the top which says that the article seems to be translated automatically and needs improvement, and frankly, this is quite self evident too. Which makes me wonder, whether someone tried to script/automate the translation (of this article) to a large number of languages?

  0: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pronunciation_of_the_English_surname_Woodard.ogg
  1: https://xtools.wmcloud.org/ec/en.wikipedia.org/Swmmng

UR is Urdu, GUR is Gurene (a language spoken in parts of Ghana and Burkina Faso), and VEP is the Veps language, spoken by the Veps people in Karelia. VE is Venda, spoken in parts of Zimbabwe and South Africa.

I mean, they also self report here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_articles_w...

I concur. Most Wikipedia articles in different languages on the same topic are not translations of each other, in my experience. It is better to think of them as independent of each other.

Yeah, this needs determinations as to which are translations of each others, and which are independent articles on same topics.

Humanity clearly must not go down this path, yet it does nothing to alter its trajectory. Those who study history are doomed to watch it repeat. It's hard not to develop distain for the collective stupidity, but more enraging is the impotent passivity of the best and the brightest. We seem unable to imagine a reachable future that is worth imagining, the daunting scale of our global problems stupefying us.

I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do. So I'll leave it up to you.

> Wokipedia has a possibly terminal case of the woke mind virus.

- 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.

The value of Wikipedia is provided mostly by its community of users, not any assets owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. All legal entities currently associated with Wikipedia could be completely seized and shut down; all it takes for it to be reborn is a critical mass of engaged users picking a new domain to rehost the content and telling everyone about it.

> It saddens me that we will probably see the end of wikipedia soon... I expect the slow ramp of anti wikipedia rhetoric... Now that college students are using completely unsourced...

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.

> I wonder why

A very active member of their community armed with a translator, very probably.

There is a lot of low-hanging fruit for low-effort, semi-automated article creators.

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.

There seems to be a recency bias, as the odds of our present day politicians all being as historically important as the rest of the list is unlikely. Makes sense that things of recent media attention are higher priority for translation, irrespective of how "important" they are in the grand scheme of history.

> but I do wonder what David Woodard, Basshunter, and Corbin Bleu did

I don't know who the others are, but as someone who grew up 1990s/2000s in Sweden playing video games and being at LAN parties, Basshunter was wildly popular in Sweden at the time, and looking him up now, apparently around the world too. I'm guessing the combination of making songs about video games/internet culture (like "The bot Anna" and "We sit in Ventrilo and playing DOTA") as early as that, with songs translated into other languages had some impact on his popularity, and I feel like many people who'd enjoy Basshunter probably likes nerdy things like editing Wikipedia too.

The Corbin Bleu thing has been a fascination for awhile, I think. I seem to remember a thread on SomethingAwful or 4chan or something years ago.

I am pretty convinced it was just an in-joke in some online community or even just a group of friends to make this perfectly-fine-but-completely-unremarkable actor on of the most famous people on Wikipedia. Like, some completely mundane actor immortal by making him one of the most ubiquitous pages on Wikipedia is pretty funny.

I honestly could see myself doing that if I had more friends.

I had Cgpt translate into a very local actual dialect (as opposed to the official language of the country I'm in). According to the locals, they couldn't believe how accurate it is.

He's #4 among humans, behind David Woodard, Michael Jackson, and Jesus.