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.
I could've sworn I remembered such a post, thank you so much for vindicating my hunch! At the time I figured there wasn't much harm in it, but in hindsight it's obvious that the absurd number of translations was the just smoke stemming from a self-promotion fire.
Props to whatever HackerNewsian (YCombinist?) took the time to chase all this down and do this fascinating writeup! You will be remembered in /r/TodayILearned posts every few months for many decades to come, no doubt.
I see the defense on that context that admins aren't really mods when practically speaking they do act like mods by closing discussions - in theory this is when "Wikipedia has reached an opinion". In practice it is very easy for it to be when it has reached their opinion.
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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...
I could've sworn I remembered such a post, thank you so much for vindicating my hunch! At the time I figured there wasn't much harm in it, but in hindsight it's obvious that the absurd number of translations was the just smoke stemming from a self-promotion fire.
Props to whatever HackerNewsian (YCombinist?) took the time to chase all this down and do this fascinating writeup! You will be remembered in /r/TodayILearned posts every few months for many decades to come, no doubt.
I see the defense on that context that admins aren't really mods when practically speaking they do act like mods by closing discussions - in theory this is when "Wikipedia has reached an opinion". In practice it is very easy for it to be when it has reached their opinion.