Quantifying Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias

Abstract

As one of the most popular sources of information in the world, Wikipedia is edited by a large, global community of contributors. User-generated nature of this online encyclopedia ensures that the information reflects a wide range of topics. Hovewer, Wikipedia articles are created and edited independently in each language version. Therefore, some topics may be presented with varying degrees of completeness depending on their importance in a particular language community. In this paper, we quantified the concept of Americanization on a global scale through comparative analysis of the coverage of American topics in different language versions of Wikipedia. For this purpose, we analyzed over 90 million Wikidata items and 40 million Wikipedia articles in 58 languages. We discussed whether Americanization is more or less dominant in different languages, regions, and cultures. We showed that the interest in American topics is not universal. Western, developed countries are more Americanized (more interested in topics related to America) than the rest of the world. This is the first global, quantitative confirmation of issues often hypothesized, or assumed, in the literature on Americanization and related phenomena. This study shows that Wikipedia and Wikidata can allow quantification of social science concepts that previously were considered not realistically measurable. Finally, the presented research is also relevant to the discourses on the biases of Wikipedia.