Scientific article entitled “Quantifying Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias” was published in the Social Science Computer Review journal. The work is the first global, quantitative confirmation of issues often raised or assumed in the literature on Americanization and related phenomena.
This work examines the phenomenon of Americanization on a global scale through a comparative analysis of thematic content regarding the United States in different language versions of Wikipedia. The study used over 90 million Wikidata items and 40 million Wikipedia articles in 58 languages. The goal was to determine whether Americanization is more or less dominant in different languages, regions and cultures.
As one of the world’s most popular sources of information, Wikipedia is edited by a large, global community of contributors. The open editing policy of this encyclopedia ensures that the information reflects a wide range of topics. However, Wikipedia articles are created and edited independently in each language version. Therefore, certain topics may be presented with varying degrees of completeness, depending on their importance in a given language community.
This study shows that open data from Wikipedia and Wikidata can enable the quantification of social science concepts that were previously considered unrealistic to measure. Work entitled “Quantifying Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias” was published on the SAGE Publications website. Authors of the study: Piotr Konieczny, Włodzimierz Lewoniewski.