dataset_name: WikiCulture
language:
- en
license: mit
task_categories:
- text-generation
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
source_datasets:
- wikipedia
configs:
- config_name: AF
data_files:
- split: train
path: AF.parquet
- config_name: AS
data_files:
- split: train
path: AS.parquet
- config_name: AU
data_files:
- split: train
path: AU.parquet
- config_name: CH
data_files:
- split: train
path: CH.parquet
- config_name: EU
data_files:
- split: train
path: EU.parquet
- config_name: LA
data_files:
- split: train
path: LA.parquet
- config_name: ME
data_files:
- split: train
path: ME.parquet
- config_name: NA
data_files:
- split: train
path: NA.parquet
Wikipedia Culture Dataset (nDNA/WikiCulture)
Overview
This dataset provides coarse-grained geographic culture labels for English Wikipedia articles, mapped into eight buckets:
- NA: North America
- EU: Europe
- AU: Oceania (UN M49 “Oceania”)
- AS: Asia (excluding Western Asia and Greater China)
- CH: Greater China (CN, HK, MO, TW)
- AF: Africa
- LA: Latin America & Caribbean (Americas excluding Northern America)
- ME: Middle East (UN M49 “Western Asia”)
The labels are intended for controlled sampling and stratified analysis of Wikipedia content by broad region. They are not intended as fine-grained cultural or ethnographic ground truth.
Data Sources
The dataset is constructed from three public components:
- UN M49 country/area regional classification (UN Statistics Division), used to generate a deterministic mapping from ISO3166-1 alpha-2 codes to the eight buckets.
- Wikipedia Cultural Diversity dataset, used as the article-level signal source (including per-article ISO country code and Wikidata-derived fields) [https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7039514].
wikimedia/wikipedia(Hugging Face dataset), used to attach the full article text via a join.
Labeling Methodology
1) Deterministic ISO2 → bucket mapping (UN M49)
An ISO3166-1 alpha-2 code is mapped to one of the eight buckets using UN M49 region/subregion fields:
- EU if UN M49 Region = Europe
- AF if Region = Africa
- AU if Region = Oceania
- ME if Sub-region = Western Asia
- NA if Region = Americas and Sub-region = Northern America
- LA if Region = Americas and not Northern America
- CH if ISO2 ∈ {CN, HK, MO, TW} (Taiwan forced to CH)
- AS if Region = Asia and not Western Asia and not CH
This mapping is deterministic and versioned.
2) Geo label assignment from CCC
Each article in the CCC dump provides iso3166 (ISO3166-1 alpha-2). The primary label is:
culture_geo = bucket(iso3166)
Rows with missing iso3166 or unmapped ISO2 are excluded.
3) High-precision consistency filtering
To increase label precision and remove cross-regional or ambiguous items, an additional consistency check is applied using CCC’s Wikidata-derived columns:
country_wdlocation_wd
Offline QID → ISO2 bootstrap.
Because no online Wikidata queries are used, we construct a bootstrapped mapping from QID to ISO2 by taking the most frequent iso3166 observed for each qitem in the CCC dump.
Evidence extraction.
For each article, QIDs are parsed from country_wd and location_wd, mapped to ISO2 using the bootstrapped table, then converted to bucket sets via the UN M49 mapping.
Hard-strong inclusion rule. An article is retained as high-precision if:
- It has at least one non-empty evidence set from
country_wdorlocation_wd, and - If
location_wdevidence is present, it must equal{culture_geo}exactly; otherwise, country_wdevidence must equal{culture_geo}exactly.
This rule is deliberately discard-heavy.
4) Middle East retention exception
In the CCC snapshot used, many ME-labeled rows have empty evidence after offline QID resolution (coverage limitations of the bootstrapped mapping). To avoid eliminating nearly all ME-labeled examples, a restricted exception is applied:
- If
culture_geo == "ME"and both evidence sets are empty, the row is retained (geo-only).
Attaching Wikipedia Text (wikimedia/wikipedia join)
The final dataset includes the full article text by merging the filtered labeled table with the Hugging Face dataset wikimedia/wikipedia.
A left inner join is performed on the article identifier:
- CCC / labeled table:
page_id wikimedia/wikipedia:id
- CCC / labeled table:
Only rows that match across both sources are included in the released dataset, ensuring every labeled example has associated article text.
Dataset Fields
Each row contains:
page_title(string): Wikipedia article title (from CCC / Wikipedia metadata)Qid(string): Wikidata QID (qitem)culture_geo(string): one of{NA, EU, AU, AS, CH, AF, LA, ME}text(string): The article text (fromwikimedia/wikipedia)
Intended Use
This dataset is suitable for:
- constructing geographically stratified Wikipedia subsets,
- controlled pretraining mixtures or evaluation subsets by region,
- studying representation and performance disparities across broad regions.
It is not suitable for:
- fine-grained cultural identity claims,
- country-level ground truth without additional validation,
- resolving inherently transnational or multi-regional topics (which are preferentially excluded by design).
Limitations
- Labels are coarse and operationalize “culture” as broad geography.
- The strict filter excludes many global and transnational pages.
- The offline QID→ISO2 bootstrap is a heuristic and may miss QIDs not well-represented in the CCC rows.
- The Middle East geo-only exception yields a subset with weaker evidence than the hard-strong subset, but is retained to mitigate coverage loss under offline constraints.
- The final dataset includes only articles present in both the labeled CCC-derived table and
wikimedia/wikipediaafter thepage_id↔idjoin.
Reproducibility
The pipeline is deterministic given:
- the UN M49 table snapshot used,
- the CCC dump snapshot used,
- the fixed mapping rules and filtering rule described above,
- the
wikimedia/wikipediasnapshot/config used for the text join.
Licensing and Attribution
This dataset is derived from Wikipedia-related resources and UN statistical classifications. Users should comply with the licensing and attribution requirements of:
- Wikipedia content (CC BY-SA and related terms),
- the CCC dataset’s licensing/terms,
- UN M49 documentation and terms where applicable.
Citation
If you use this dataset, cite:
- the CCC dataset (Wikipedia Cultural Diversity / Cultural Context Content) and associated publication,
- UN M49 (UN Statistics Division),
- the
wikimedia/wikipediaHugging Face dataset, - this dataset repository (
nDNA/WikiCulture).