World heritage sites
Why are these statistics needed?
Statistics on UNESCO world heritage sites (online visits on Wikipedia) are taken as a measure of popularity of the sites or a measure of cultural consumption of world heritage. Among others, they are relevant to culture statistics and regional statistics.
Possible analyses include the comparison between the several sites – for example, the Taj Mahal is the most popular site on the English Wikipedia site – and their evolution over time.
Why are they experimental?
These statistics are published as experimental statistics because they result from a big data project using Wikipedia as a source.
How are they produced?
Page views of Wikipedia articles focusing on around 1 000 UNESCO world heritage sites have been analysed. One or more Wikipedia articles – in 31 language versions – is associated to each site and the total number of page views is taken as a measure of popularity of the sites.
Wikipedia provides insights on topics completely uncovered so far by traditional sources and provides a good level of detail of the data. This source also presents very high temporal detail (hourly data) and potential for timeliness (around 5 hours) which have not been explored.
For further details, please consult our methodological note.
Access to the statistics
Feedback
To help Eurostat improve these experimental statistics, users and researchers are kindly invited to give us their feedback by email:
- What have you used this data for?
- What do you think is the main added value?
- Are there other domains, besides world heritage sites, which would be interesting to explore with this data source?
- Is online activity only in Wikipedia sufficient to produce some relevant statistics?