Abstract

Wikipedia is an important source of general knowledge covering a wide range of topics. Moreover, for many people around the world, it also serves as an essential news source for major events such as elections or disasters. Although Wikipedia covers many such events, some events are underrepresented and lack attention, despite their newsworthiness predicted from news value theory. In this paper, we analyze 17 490 event articles in four Wikipedia language editions and examine how the economic status and geographic region of the event location affects the attention and coverage it receives. We find that major Wikipedia language editions have a skewed focus, with more attention given to events in the world’s more economically developed countries and less attention to events in less affluent regions. However, other factors, such as the number of deaths in a disaster, are also associated with the attention an event receives. Overall, this work provides a nuanced understanding of attention and coverage on Wikipedia through event articles and adds new empirical analysis to news value theory.

Metadata

publication

PLoS one 18 (11), e0289325, 2023

year

2023

publication date

2023/11/8

authors

Thorsten Ruprechter, Keith Burghardt, Denis Helic

link

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0289325

resource_link

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0289325

journal

PLoS one

volume

18

issue

11

pages

e0289325

publisher

Public Library of Science