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Despite all the differences that separate a bustling Asian metropolis and Anytown, U.S.A, humanity has a few common shared interests: pop culture, sex and ... geography.

This is according to data from Wikipedia, the crowd-edited encyclopedia thats one of the most popular websites in the world. The site is visited by more than 1 billion devices a day, according to the companys internal data, and it offers more than 41 million articles in more than 200 languages.

But despite that breadth of subjects, there are a few topics that are particularly popular across the globe.

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Among English-language articles, pop culture-related entries make up slightly more than 40% of page hits for the top 100 pages. That was also the most-popular category for Chinese-language (also slightly above 40%) and Japanese-language pages. Pop culture was by far the most dominant category in Japan, accounting for almost 80% of the page hits for the top 100 pages.

If you know Japan, that shouldnt surprise you, said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedias co-founder.

While pop culture ranked as one of the most in-demand categories on Wikipedia across regions, it was less popular elsewhere. In France and Germany, it was second to geography; nearly 40% of the top 100 pages in German were related to that topic.

Im not sure thats a good thing, Wales joked of Germanys keen interest in the rest of the globe.

Geography was also the top topic in Russian-language Wikipedia entries, followed by sex-related topics.

In fact, sex ranked as a major area of interest across regions, though not to the extent it was in Russia. It was the sixth-most popular topic in English and German-language pages, and the third-most popular on Chinese and Japanese pages, although it comprised a small percentage in Japan.

There are two languages where sex doesnt appear as a favorite topic: French and Spanish.

This confused me at first, Wales said, until it was explained to me that the French and Spanish are actually having sex, while the rest of us are just reading about it.

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Despite the ubiquity of Wikipedia, Wales acknowledged that these results could be skewed given certain biases in who writes and edits the site.

While anyone can make changes or submit new articles, 87% of the contributors are male. We do consider that a problem. Its something we would really like to change, Wales said. We know that people write about things theyre passionate about, and there is a gender component to that.

He noted that entries about award-winning female authors tended, on average, to be shorter than ones about award-winning male authors.

Its not that the contributors are overtly sexist, but due to issues outside Wikipedia, their interests arent necessarily consistent, which shows up on the site. He added that some women may be put off from contributing by the dominance of male contributors. We want to make sure that women arent being excluded by badly behaving men in the community, he said.

Wales spoke at the Morningstar Investment Conference, and focused his talk on the spread of free information. He noted that Wikipedia recently encrypted its programming as a security measure, prohibiting spying governments, for example, from seeing which specific article a reader was viewing.

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Previously, governments could have banned specific articles on Wikipedia, while leaving others accessible. The move to encryption forced them to decide whether to block the whole site or allow readers full access. Every country opted to allow Wikipedia, with the sole exception of China, Wales said.

It sounds like a paradox, he added, but encryption led to the spread of free knowledge.

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Sex, pop culture and the other most popular Wikipedia topics by language - MarketWatch