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?
- the page was originally published in 2017 by user Swmmng without any content, just a random photo of blue sapphire [1];
- the second revision of the article [2], published one minute after the first one, actually has content, but it's clearly machine translated.
So yes, it's a "clever" form of spam.
[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Woodard&old...
[2] https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Woodard&old...
One main aspect in play here is that we're dealing with over 300 sets of Wikipedia editors in different projects. Each Wikipedia language-based project is siloed, with its own complement of editors, admins, policies and guidelines. Sure, you can edit more than one Wikipedia from a single account, but there is typically a true community that coalesces in each one, and they set the culture and the rules of behavior.
I have found that many are less deletionist and less vigilant and more welcoming of new content in general. The majority of these articles may be under the radar for them. They may not detect anything wrong with the articles. They may not care. They may have too few editors patrolling in general, to clean up minor issues like this.
Another thing about the small communities that have formed, they often understandably do not always enjoy when an editor comes cross-wiki to combat some perceived abuse or vandalism. It is not what some user did on another wiki that matters to them, if a local user is not being disruptive, per se, then they should not be subject to any disciplinary action.
So if anyone were to pursue this seemingly minor issue of single-article spam, they'd need to pursue it more than 300 times in 300 different ways, subject to 300 separate policies and guidelines interpreted by that many communities of editors and admins. That's sort of a radioactive task for anyone there.
Moderators
The truth is that Wikipedia content is not governed by a hierarchical administration, and all ordinary editors collaborate there to achieve consensus.
Administrators on Wikipedia have the responsibility for administrative tasks, privileged things, and disciplinary actions. Not content, not choosing what sort of articles to delete, not cleaning up articles.
See, I tried to give benefit of the doubt and a favorable interpretation, and someone who isn't the GP chimes in to perpetuate the myth. I'm curious about the myth: where does it come from and how do so many people sincerely just believe this is how Wikipedia works? Is "mods and admins" the default "go-to group" that cleans up other websites? Is it a specific meme from Reddit or some other forum type place? "Moderators" are usually the ones who execute discipline on forum discussions and users. That's not even a relevant role in terms of Wikipedia. But even within the noticeboards and talk pages, newbies come in all the time to appeal to "mods and admins", please address our problem. It's interesting how uniform the myth becomes!
I've also seen that they've uploaded "name pronunciations" to Wikimedia that are done via TTS engines that are not, precisely, last generation. [0] Looks like some sort of automation exercise. Edited in a bunch of languages, but mostly in English. [1]
0: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pronunciation_of_the_English_surname_Woodard.ogg
1: https://xtools.wmcloud.org/ec/en.wikipedia.org/SwmmngThough, 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.