Each country’s Wikipedia page is replete with information on that nation’s economy, culture, and geography. And, on many occasions, the most repeated word on each of those pages is quite symbolic and representative of each country. (although of course there is always a surprise).
That was what the people in charge of the crossword puzzle web platform Crossword Solver discovered when they got down to work to, precisely, create a map of popular words for each country page.
To do this, they collected the texts, they omitted words such as the names of people, places and companies, as well as demonyms and link words (like “un”, “the”, “of” and the like… or, at least, their equivalents in English, of course), And they got to work to create the map in question on the words that most link Internet users with each country.
Thus, ‘cocoa’ is revealed as the most popular term on the Ivory Coast page (in its main export) and ‘sauna’ as the most popular in Finland, where between 60% and 90% of the population visit one at least once a week. But the most mentioned word on the Spanish Wikipedia page is neither ‘olive oil’ nor ‘siesta’ No.
How to request the DIGITAL CERTIFICATE of an INDIVIDUAL from the FNMTWhat do you think? representative?
The most mentioned word on the Wikipedia page is ‘autonomy’ (‘autonomy’, referring to the autonomous communities). It’s not as good as ‘space’ (Russia), ‘chess’ (Israel), ‘Renaissance’ (Italy) or ‘nature’ (Suriname), but at least it’s better than ‘Strike’. [de estado]’ (Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau), ‘Genocide’ (Rwanda) or ‘Murder’ (Dominican Republic).
According to CrossWord Solver,
“Wikipedia’s portrait of the world is distorted by vandalism, bias and simple misunderstanding. Just like the real world. Even so, the world continues to read and represent itself on Wikipedia.”
The latter is true… up to a point: the English Wikipedia is not necessarily a reflection of how “the world represents itself”but being the most popular language version of Wikipedia, and given the complexity of grouping terms in more than 300 languages, we are going to accept ship.
This is not the first world map that CrossWord Solver has made using data from Wikipedia: they already made another one with the countries most mentioned in the pages of other different countries. On that occasion, the most mentioned in the Wikipedia page on Spain was ‘Portugal’, although the most mentioned in Portugal was ‘Brasil’. In fact, ‘Spain’ only held that distinction of ‘most mentioned country’ in the pages of Morocco, Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines.
