This came up on HN a few months ago, when someone posted a list of most-translated articles and Woodard was at the top: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031697

It looks like a user in the HN thread noticed the irregularities on the Italian Wikipedia [0] and started the deletion discussion [1] that the article credits with kickstarting this investigation.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44035222

[1]: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pagine_da_cancellare...