On May 11, the tenth edition of the scientific forum for people studying various aspects of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects – Wiki Workshop 2023 took place. As part of this event, the results of scientific research in the area of analysis of global interest in American topics in the multilingual Wikipedia were presented.
Using over 90 million Wikidata items and over 40 million Wikipedia articles in 58 languages, the study compared global interest in America-related topics across regions and cultures. The aim of the research was to understand whether Americanization is more or less dominant in different areas of the world, and to determine whether interest in American topics is universal. The following table shows some results for selected Wikipedia languages:
| Abbr. | Language version of Wikipedia | PPCRW | VPC | US RAS | US RAVS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| en | English | 60% | 80% | 16.31% | 31.58% |
| it | Italian | 86% | 92% | 11.37% | 18.89% |
| es | Spanish | 70% | 60% | 10.85% | 16.79% |
| fr | French | 76% | 68% | 9.13% | 16.26% |
| de | German | 73% | 77% | 7.03% | 16.01% |
| pt | Portuguese | 54% | 80% | 11.31% | 15.32% |
| ru | Russian | 85% | 59% | 5.92% | 14.10% |
| nl | Dutch | 34% | 69% | 4.82% | 11.92% |
| sv | Swedish | 57% | 89% | 2.92% | 10.68% |
| pl | Polish | 81% | 81% | 7.28% | 10.31% |
| zh | Chinese | 7% | 68% | 6.73% | 9.61% |
| uk | Ukrainian | 24% | 85% | 7.20% | 7.35% |
| ar | Arabic | 60% | 70% | 13.69% | 6.11% |
| vi | Vietnamese | 71% | 92% | 3.78% | 5.06% |
Shortcut description:
- PPRCW – People in a Primary Country Reading that Wikipedia (that language version)
- VPC – Views from the Primary Country
- US RAS – United States-related articles share
- US RAVS — United States-related articles views share
Authors of the research: Piotr Konieczny (Hanyang University, South Korea) oraz Włodzimierz Lewoniewski (Poznań University of Economics and Business).
Publication entitled “Measuring Americanization: A Global Quantitative Study of Interest in American Topics on Wikipedia” is available at the workshop website: wikiworkshop.org/2023