Ahn Sung-ki and Choi Jiwoo exist on one Southeast Asian Wikipedia, and it is not the biggest one

Ahn Sung-ki has been acting since he was five. He has a National Order of Cultural Merit and more than a hundred and thirty films. Across the four Southeast Asian Wikipedias we track — Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Malay — exactly one of them has written an article about him.

So has Choi Jiwoo, whose Winter Sonata is the drama usually credited with starting the Korean wave in Asia. One edition. The same one.

How many, and where

Of 1,023 Korean actors in our panel, 421 appear on exactly one of the four editions. Of 1,701 music acts, 828 do.

The Indonesian edition holds 97.1 per cent of the singly-covered actors and 90.1 per cent of the singly-covered music acts. The other three editions, between them, hold fewer than one in ten.

The most-read of these one-edition names, on the edition that has them: Choi Jiwoo at 36.37 reads per million, Ahn Sung-ki at 36.42, Yuha at 26.14, Ryu Da-in at 25.84, Ahn Eun-jin at 24.15. In Thai the single most-read is Koo Jun-yup at 5.04; in Malay, Na Yoon-kwon at 4.54.

The obvious explanation, and why it fails

A larger encyclopaedia would be expected to hold more of everything, so the first guess is that the Indonesian Wikipedia is simply the biggest of the four.

It is not. The Vietnamese Wikipedia has 1,304,001 articles against Indonesian’s 790,784, and more active editors — 4,726 against 4,690. It holds 31 of these names to Indonesian’s 1,155.

We can rule size out. We did not measure what replaces it, and we are not going to guess.

What this is not

It is not a popularity measurement. Whether an article exists is a decision made by editors. Chang Ryul is the only actor in our panel written up in Thai alone; that tells you what Thai editors have got round to, not what Thai readers know. A star unwritten in Malay may be perfectly well known in Malaysia. Nothing on this page separates “nobody wrote it” from “nobody wanted it”, and we will not pretend otherwise.

It is also bounded by our panel, which is built from the casts and acts behind Korean titles that reached a Netflix country chart. Someone outside that is not counted at all.

Counted twice, on purpose

We have been caught once this month by a check that reused the same field it was checking — it reported no problem, because it was the same question asked twice.

So coverage here was counted two ways: the edition count recorded against each person, and the number of editions that actually returned a reading figure. The two agree for every one of the 2,724 people on this page. Had they disagreed anywhere, the builder was written to refuse to produce the table at all.

The full lists, the size comparison and the limits are on held by one edition.