This New Research Reveals The Most Commonly Used Word On Wikipedia

Whether you love it or hate it, Wikipedia has been a part of so many internet users’ lives for decades.

Today, the famous webpage is home to 318 different languages from all across the world. And many people still go back to it when they wish to tell a story or perhaps read one to the world.

It’s a great endeavor but with its many benefits come plenty of flaws. Wikipedia showcases a great portrait of the world and it’s mostly ruined by the likes of vandalism, bias, and misinformation.

Whatever the case may be, we all still go back and resort to it for help. And today, more than 27 different nations exist with millions of page views. Be it Japan, the USA, or even China- readers can’t get enough and this website counts for so many hits.

But have you ever wondered what terms are the most commonly used by global citizens to represent themselves? Well, if the answer is no, there’s nothing to worry about.

Thanks to a new study by Crossword-Solver, researchers were able to get to the bottom of it. And by that, we mean finding the terms and locations that are commonly seen and used on every one of its pages around the globe.

What the researchers ended up doing is gating information from different Wikipedia pages and eliminating any stop words, demonyms, and also locations. Similarly, they got rid of prepositions, companies, surnames, and even link terms. Whatever was left was calculated and then they used algorithms to highlight the most unique terms of them all on every page. After that, they put the names of the countries back in place and saw which word was used the most in each nation.

So, what did they end up finding? Well, the most commonly used term on the US page was native and it popped up at least 22 times. Moreover, as far as the UK was concerned, the term devolve showed up 13 times.

Meanwhile, the country that was spoken about the most on each page was the US. And in terms of states, New York, Virginia, and Missouri led the pack.

The authors also saw how both the US and Mexico pages continued to highlight native aspects. And as they hypothesized during the start of the study, the most commonly used term for any country reflected its national culture and a different aspect of nature or local history.

Other similar findings saw how there was a diverse map of terms. Regions like Europe portrayed obsession with the term bureaucracy. For instance, the UK was obsessed with devolving, while the Netherlands was obsessed with insurance. Similarly, Danish users loved tax while Finland likes saunas and Iceland adores eruptions.
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As far as Africa is concerned, there was a mixed blend of natural resources that people adored talking about. There was Cobalt common in Congo while tobacco was common in Malawi while Diamond was more prevalent in Botswana and Namibia.

America had natives on its mind while Mexico had indigenous spoken of at least 66 times. For Canada, it was percent. And it’s also interesting how the Wikipedia page in Canada loved talking about the US. than any other country. The same was for regions like the Pacific and Caribbean.

A lot of these nations have strong ties from the past with the US and that might be one reason why.

If we look at three consecutive pages of US states on Wikipedia, the term oil tends to pop up the most and it overlapped on many other states’ pages too.

How’s that for some very interesting facts? This data was collected in August of 2022 so as you can tell, it’s fairly recent.





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