Attention · The International Desk
The World Looked Up Ninety Things Yesterday. It Agreed on —.
The most-read articles on nine Wikipedias, matched subject-by-subject across languages. Each language sees its own front page; almost nothing crosses over. What does cross over is the day's one true world story.
Every Wikipedia keeps a ledger of what its readers looked up. Lay nine of them side by side — two and a half billion people's languages — and match the entries by subject, not by spelling, and you can measure something usually only guessed at: how much of the world's attention is actually shared.
The ledgers are still being matched…
The Common Front Pagesubjects that made the most-read list in three or more languages at once
The International Deskthe ten most-read articles in each edition — hover any entry for its English description, click to read it
Ink key
read in 3+ languages
read in 2
read in this one alone
bar length = views, relative to each column's no. 1
Figures are for the most recent full day available from the Wikimedia pageview pipeline.
Subjects are matched across languages by Wikidata item, so a footballer counts as the same story in Arabic and Italian even when no letter of his name survives translation. Main pages, search pages and non-article namespaces are excluded; Wikipedia's view counts exclude known bots and spiders, but some automated traffic inevitably leaks through — treat single odd entries with suspicion.
The Plover · Attention desk.
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