BTS is read most in Vietnam and Byeon Woo-seok in Thailand. The 20 biggest are all read least in Malay

BTS is read more on the Vietnamese Wikipedia than anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Byeon Woo-seok peaks in Thai. Across the whole panel, the Indonesian edition takes first place for 81 different stars.

First place moves. Last place does not.

The tally

We can compare 374 Korean stars who have an article on all four editions — Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Malay — with reads expressed per million reads of that whole edition, so the size of each encyclopaedia is already divided out.

Three editions share the top between them. One takes the bottom for 82.9 per cent of the panel. And among the twenty most-read stars — BTS, Babymonster, Byeon Woo-seok, V, Kim Seon-ho, EXO, IU, Im Yoon-ah, Cha Eun-woo and eleven more — it is last for all twenty, without exception.

The six most common orderings, covering most of the panel, all end the same way. The disagreement is entirely about first place.

The explanation we cannot rule out

Here is the thing that stops this being a story about interest.

Malay and Indonesian are close enough to read across. A reader in Kuala Lumpur can open the Indonesian article and understand it. If they do, their reading is counted in the Indonesian column, not the Malay one.

Nothing in this data separates “a Malaysian reader used the Indonesian article” from “a Malaysian reader did not look”. Both produce exactly the table above. We are not going to pick the one that makes the better headline.

What we can say is narrower and still worth saying: if you are deciding where a Korean title’s readers actually show up in Southeast Asia, they do not show up on the Malay Wikipedia — whoever they are and in whatever language they are reading.

What the gaps look like

Within a single star the spread is large. Babymonster is read 7.4 times more in its strongest country than its weakest. Im Yoon-ah, 7.4. IU, 6.8. EXO, 6.6. Cha Eun-woo is the flattest of the top ten at 2.8, which makes him the closest thing here to an act read evenly across the region.

These are ratios between countries for the same person, so they do not depend on how famous that person is overall.

One thing we had to fix first

Our music panel and our actor panel overlap. IU, Im Yoon-ah and Cha Eun-woo are in both, because they act and they sing.

The first version of this count treated the two panels as separate lists and added them up. IU appeared twice in our own top twenty. We now count each person once by their Wikidata id, and the check for it lives in the builder rather than in our memory.

The tables, the six orderings and the limits are on who reads least. The neighbouring finding — that Malaysia reads Korean brands more readily than Korean people — is on Malaysia.