# Why the World Reads Wikipedia: Beyond English Speakers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00474 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00474/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

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- [Are Large Language Models a Threat to Digital Public Goods? Evidence from Activity on Stack Overflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07367/) (2023)
- [An Open Multilingual System for Scoring Readability of Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01835/) (2024)
- [Wiki-Reliability: A Large Scale Dataset for Content Reliability on Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04117/) (2021)
- [Fair multilingual vandalism detection system for Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01650/) (2023)
- [Impact of AI Search Summaries on Website Traffic: Evidence from Google AI Overviews and Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18455/) (2026)
- [MegaWika 2: A More Comprehensive Multilingual Collection of Articles and their Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03828/) (2025)
- [WIKIGENBENCH: Exploring Full-length Wikipedia Generation under Real-World Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18264/) (2024)
- [Measuring Wikipedia Article Quality in One Dimension by Extending ORES with Ordinal Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10684/) (2021)
- [Considerations for Multilingual Wikipedia Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02483/) (2022)
- [Lost in translation: using global fact-checks to measure multilingual misinformation prevalence, spread, and evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18089/) (2023)
- [Characterizing Knowledge Manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia Fork](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10663/) (2025)
- [Bias in Knowledge Graphs -- an Empirical Study with Movie Recommendation and Different Language Editions of DBpedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00674/) (2021)
- [On the effective transfer of knowledge from English to Hindi Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05708/) (2024)
- [Wikipedia is Not a Dictionary, Delete! Text Classification as a Proxy for Analysing Wiki Deletion Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10294/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As one of the Web's primary multilingual knowledge sources, Wikipedia is read by millions of people across the globe every day. Despite this global readership, little is known about why users read Wikipedia's various language editions. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comparative study by combining a large-scale survey of Wikipedia readers across 14 language editions with a log-based analysis of user activity. We proceed in three steps. First, we analyze the survey results to compare the prevalence of Wikipedia use cases across languages, discovering commonalities, but also substantial differences, among Wikipedia languages with respect to their usage. Second, we match survey responses to the respondents' traces in Wikipedia's server logs to characterize behavioral patterns associated with specific use cases, finding that distinctive patterns consistently mark certain use cases across language editions. Third, we show that certain Wikipedia use cases are more common in countries with certain socio-economic characteristics; e.g., in-depth reading of Wikipedia articles is substantially more common in countries with a low Human Development Index. These findings advance our understanding of reader motivations and behaviors across Wikipedia languages and have implications for Wikipedia editors and developers of Wikipedia and other Web technologies.