Quantifying Americanization: a comparative analysis of information related to the United States in different language versions of Wikipedia

The study focuses on a global analysis of the phenomenon of Americanization, carried out by comparing the content of articles thematically related to the United States in different language versions of Wikipedia. For this purpose, over 90 million Wikidata elements and over 40 million Wikipedia articles in 58 language versions were analyzed. The main goal was to determine the extent to which Americanization is present in different languages, regions and cultures.

Wikipedia, as one of the most popular sources of information in the world, is edited by a wide, global community. Thanks to the principle of open access to editing, this encyclopedia reflects the diversity of topics. However, each language version of Wikipedia is created and edited independently, which may lead to differences in the scope and completeness of topics presented depending on their importance in a given language community.

This study demonstrates that open data from Wikipedia and Wikidata can be used to quantify various social science concepts that were previously considered difficult or even unrealistic to measure. Scientific article entitled “Quantifying Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias” was published on the SAGE Publications website. Authors of the work: Piotr Konieczny, Włodzimierz Lewoniewski.