You can currently access and contribute to 281 active Wikipedia language versions. What follows is a top-25 list of ‘books’ ranked by the number of articles dedicated to these ‘books’ in different Wikipedia language editions (results first, explanation thereafter):

Wikidata item	Title	Authorlabel	Linkcount
Q8258	One Thousand and One Nights	anonymous	116
Q15228	The Lord of the Rings	J. R. R. Tolkien	115
Q480	Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes	113
Q25338	Le Petit Prince	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	110
Q40591	The Communist Manifesto	Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels	108
Q459842	Book of Mormon	Joseph Smith	106
Q208460	Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell	102
Q8251	The Art of War	Sun Tzu	95
Q92640	Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	93
Q8279	Shahnameh	Ferdowsi	93
Q74287	The Hobbit	J. R. R. Tolkien	91
Q43361	Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone	J. K. Rowling	86
Q1396889	Animal Farm	George Orwell	85
Q8265	Dream of the Red Chamber	Cao Xueqin	82
Q41675	Guinness World Records	Craig Glenday	80
Q48244	Mein Kampf	Adolf Hitler	80
Q8269	The Tale of Genji	Murasaki Shikibu	79
Q165318	Crime and Punishment	Fyodor Dostoyevsky	77
Q47209	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets	J. K. Rowling	77
Q47598	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban	J. K. Rowling	75
Q46887	Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince	J. K. Rowling	75
Q80817	Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix	J. K. Rowling	75
Q123397	The Republic	Plato	74
Q170583	Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	74
Q147787	Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	73

Sports commentator proclaims: Legendary Arabian story collection first, the Lord of the Rings a close runner-up, Spanish hack Cervantes completing the podium! But let’s curb our enthusiasm for this quirky race for a moment. You cannot be cautious enough when interpreting this kind of lists/rankings. There are a hundred things you’d have to involve when doing this.

Our ranking reveals nothing on the nature or quality of, let’s say, these 110 language versions of “Le Petit Prince”. We could deal with a one-sentence article in 50 Wikipedias for all we know. Understanding the genesis of Wikipedia and measuring its contents is a research field of its own. And Wikidata, although building on Wikipedia content, of course, is yet another thing whose characteristics you’d have to take into account before jumping to any rash conclusions.

Let’s start slowly. What this ranking suggests to show is a list of 25 ‘books’ (we’ll come back to this term later) that are of whatsoever importance across many countries/cultures/language communities. It is not at all a proper basis to redefine the term ‘world literature’ for the digital age. But it does include the idea of ‘world’ as part of ‘world literature’, meaning ‘books’ that transcend national and language borders, also if their literary value may vary considerably. In any case, before starting to interpret anything, you’ll always have to communicate how exactly you generated this kind of results. So …

… as an example of how the Wikidata Query Service can facilitate this type of quantitative analysis, we wrote a SPARQL query that orders ‘instances of’ ‘books’ with an author by ‘site link’. This means that if a work of literature has the statement ‘instance of book’ in Wikidata, and it has a Wikipedia page, it can be ranked by the number of Wikipedias that have a page for it.

This is easily reproducible for you at your own machines, just head over to http://query.wikidata.org and copy & paste this in the upper box, then hit “Execute” (and while the query is being processed, throw a glance at Alan Liu’s criticism of the concentration “on pushing the ‘execute’ button” in the Digital Humanities):

prefix schema: <http://schema.org/>
prefix wd: <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/>
prefix wdt: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/>

SELECT ?s ?desc ?authorlabel (COUNT(DISTINCT ?sitelink) as ?linkcount)
WHERE {
  ?s wdt:P31 wd:Q571 .
  ?sitelink schema:about ?s .
  ?s wdt:P50 ?author
  OPTIONAL {
    ?s rdfs:label ?desc filter (lang(?desc) = "en").
  }
  OPTIONAL {
    ?author rdfs:label ?authorlabel filter (lang(?authorlabel) = "en").
  }
} GROUP BY ?s ?desc ?authorlabel ORDER BY DESC(?linkcount)

Did it work for you?

By the way, changing the object criteria from ‘book’ to ‘literary work’ (wd:Q7725634) returns a different result, that includes books of the Bible (that are not classified as ‘instance of book’). Running it without the author, also yields a slightly different result, as there are a few works without an author that are very widely translated (like, for example, today’s winner, “One Thousand and One Nights”).

The query that yielded the above ranking was run today (April 25, 2016) at 08:25 CEST. If you save the results of your query (like we did, in CSV format, which can be done directly in Wikidata’s Query Service) and compare it to the same query conducted at a later date, you would have a useful rudiment for the analysis of how certain works gain or lose importance in the Wikipedian universe. Something we might come back to later. Until then, happy SPARQL’ing!

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