What are the most popular animals in the world? Using Wikipedia to quantitatively compare interest across 60,000 vertebrates

Abstract

Species vary widely in their popularity, and these variations in human interest impact conservation. The popularity of a species, for example, may influence the conservation funding that species receives and affect the long-term success of its protection efforts. As a result, understanding what drives interest in species and how it varies across cultural contexts is relevant to conservation. Here we use a ‘big data’ approach to quantitatively compare interest in ca. 60,000 vertebrate species across nearly 300 language editions of Wikipedia---a large, online encyclopedia. We assess how the popularity of a species in Wikipedia, measured in terms of its pageviews, correlates with biological attributes including distribution, body size, diet, and IUCN threat status. We find that overall interest is highly skewed with a small number of species receiving a large proportion of all pageviews. The strongest correlate with high pageviews is body size, with larger species tending to receive more views, though there are important exceptions. IUCN status also corresponds with increased popularity, with more endangered species receiving more views, demonstrating that conservation Red Listing can be effective at increasing popular attention. While a subset of species are consistently popular across language editions there are significant differences in the most popular species between languages. Overlaps, or lack thereof, in the distribution of a species and language explains much of this variation with species that are ‘local’ tending to be more popular within a given language. We argue that Wikipedia provides a useful tool for systematically comparing interest in species at large scales and propose that this approach can be applied to multiple other questions in conservation research.