BTS tops three Southeast Asian Wikipedias. Indonesia's list opens with Babymonster

Ask which Korean act Southeast Asia reads about most and you will get four different answers, depending on which Southeast Asia you mean.

Across twelve months of the Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Malay Wikipedias, BTS is the most-read Korean act in Vietnam (133.45 reads per million reads of that edition), Thailand (130.09) and Malaysia (33.93).

Indonesia’s list opens with someone else: Babymonster, at 94.02, with BTS second at 83.29.

The four lists

Reads are per million reads of that whole Wikipedia in the same twelve months, so a smaller edition is not penalised for being small.

One name out of forty is on every list

There are forty places across those four columns. Exactly one name fills a place in all four: BTS.

Everything else belongs to one country or two. Thailand reads Im Yoon-ah second and IU fourth; neither is in Malaysia’s top ten. Malaysia reads Cha Eun-woo second, and he is sixth in Thailand, seventh in Indonesia and absent from Vietnam’s ten. Jungkook, Jennie and Jisoo are in Thailand’s list and nowhere else here, which is worth pausing on — three members of BTS and Blackpink read individually in one country while the groups travel further.

Read only in one column, and nowhere else in these tables:

• Indonesia — Lee Hee-seung, Seunghan, DPR Ian, Mark Lee
• Vietnam — T.O.P, Hari Won, Jang Won-young, Tomorrow X Together
• Thailand — Jungkook, Jennie, Jisoo
• Malaysia — Stray Kids, Ahyeon, Ahn So-hee, Riize, SISTAR, Cho Kyuhyun, Ateez, Kim Jae-joong

Malaysia has eight of those, the most of any column. Its list is also the one that shares least with its neighbours.

Why we did not pool the four

Adding the four editions together would have produced one winner, and the single most useful thing in this data is that the four lists disagree. Pooling would have deleted it.

It would also have quietly favoured the larger editions. Vietnamese Wikipedia’s numbers run about four times Malay Wikipedia’s here — 133.45 against 33.93 at the top — and that gap is a fact about the two encyclopaedias, not about how much either country cares. Per-million already puts the columns on one scale; adding them would have put Vietnam’s readership in charge of the answer.

A number that was not a person

The sixth-most-read entry on the Vietnamese list arrived as Q27655344.

That is a Wikidata identifier for an item whose label we could not read. Printed in a table of names it would have looked like an act nobody has heard of, sitting above IU. We removed it, and the page says how many entries were removed for that reason — one, out of 1,701 acts in the panel.

What this does not say

This counts people opening an encyclopaedia article. Some of them are fans. Some just heard a name and wanted to know who it was. Some are checking a fact for an argument. We cannot separate them, and none of it is a ticket sold or a song streamed.

It also cannot see an act with no article in that language: absence from a column means either no article or no reads, and we do not separate those two either. And the window is twelve months, so a comeback inside it can lift an act above one that was steadier all year.

What we can say is narrow and, we think, worth having: the name at the top in Indonesia is not the name the other three share, and we did not measure what put it there.

The four full tables are at who each country reads first.