The same Korean title reaches four Wikipedias in a fixed order, and the biggest one is not first

Who writes first

A title counts for an edition if that edition's article is the oldest, or ties for oldest. 7 of the 25 titles are ties, which is why the numbers below add up to more than 25.

The obvious explanation does not hold. A bigger encyclopaedia with more editors would be expected to cover anything sooner, but the Vietnamese Wikipedia leads on articles, on active editors and on total edits, and it is not the one that writes about Korean titles first. We can rule that explanation out. We did not measure what replaces it, and we are not going to guess.

How long the rest take

Counting from the first edition to write a title to the last, the median gap is 8 months, and it runs from 0 to 83 months.

Removing any single title from the 25 leaves this median at 8 months. That rules out one way it could be fragile — it does not show that it is stable. The check is a jackknife, which is known to understate how much a median moves, so a swing it finds is real while a swing it misses may be one it cannot see. The method and its limits are here.

Read a row across, not down. The order of the country names is the order those editions wrote the title, and +n is months after the first of them.

We checked our own dates before using them

A first-revision date says when an article has existed under its current name, not when the title was first written about. Move or merge an article and the earlier revisions go with it, leaving a date that is far too recent.

So we tested every date against the months that article was actually read. If a page was read before its own first revision, the date has been erased. Of 153 dates we could test this way, 0 failed. 83 could not be tested, because those articles have no month with any reading at all.

⚠ The Korean Wikipedia is not on this page, and that is why. Its article for Squid Game reports a first revision of 2025-01 for a title from 2021, and we hold no Korean pageview data to check the rest of its dates against. An edition we cannot test is not an edition we will publish.

Why 25 titles and not 59

Of 59 titles, 25 have an article on all four editions with a first-revision date we could read. A title missing from one edition is left out entirely, because counting it would make that edition look slow when it is absent.

What this page cannot tell you

Not why. We can rule out one explanation — the edition that writes first is not the largest — but we did not measure what does explain it.

Not readers. This counts when an article was written, not when anyone read it. An audience can arrive long before an article does, or never.

Not the Korean Wikipedia. Its first-revision dates are unreliable for this and we have no pageview data to check them against, so it is not on this page at all.

First revisions — Wikipedia API. Reads — Wikimedia Pageviews API, human traffic only, monthly. Edition sizes — Wikimedia siteinfo, read 2026-08-15.