Wikipedia Matters∗
Marit Hinnosaar†

Toomas Hinnosaar‡

Michael Kummer§

Olga Slivko¶
July 14, 2019

Abstract
We document a causal impact of online user-generated information on real-world
economic outcomes. In particular, we conduct a randomized field experiment totest whether additional content on Wikipedia pages about cities affects tourists’choices of overnight visits. Our treatment of adding information to Wikipedia increases overnight stays in treated cities compared to non-treated cities. The impact
is largely driven by improvements to shorter and relatively incomplete pages on
Wikipedia. Our findings highlight the value of content in digital public goods for
informing individual choices.

JEL: C93, H41, L17, L82, L83, L86
Keywords: field experiment, user-generated content, Wikipedia, tourism industry∗
We are grateful to Irene Bertschek, Avi Goldfarb, Shane Greenstein, Tobias Kretschmer, MichaelLuca, Thomas Niebel, Marianne Saam, Greg Veramendi, Joel Waldfogel, and Michael Zhang as well
as seminar audiences at the Economics of Network Industries conference (Paris), ZEW Conference on
the Economics of ICT (Mannheim), Advances with Field Experiments 2017 Conference (University of
Chicago), 15th Annual Media Economics Workshop (Barcelona), Conference on Digital Experimentation(MIT), and Digital Economics Conference (Toulouse) for valuable comments. Ruetger Egolf, David
Neseer, and Andrii Pogorielov provided outstanding research assistance. Financial support from SEEK2014 is gratefully acknowledged.
†
Collegio Carlo Alberto and CEPR, marit.hinnosaar@gmail.com‡
Collegio Carlo Alberto, toomas@hinnosaar.net§
Georgia Institute of Technology & University of East Anglia, michael.kummer@econ.gatech.edu¶
ZEW, slivko@zew.de1

1

Introduction

Asymmetric information can hinder efficient economic activity (Akerlof, 1970). In recent
decades, the Internet and new media have enabled greater access to information thanever before. However, the digital divide, language barriers, Internet censorship, andtechnological constraints still create inequalities in the amount of accessible information.1
How much does it matter for economic outcomes?
In this paper, we analyze the causal impact of online information on real-world economic outcomes. In particular, we measure the impact of information on one of the
primary economic decisions—consumption. As the source of information, we focus on
Wikipedia. It is one of the most important online sources of reference. It is the fifth mostpopular website in the world2 and receives about 14 billion direct page views per month.3,4However, the information available across Wikipedia’s 299 language editions is not thesame. We analyze whether the differences in available information affect consumption
choices.
We quantify the causal impact of information in Wikipedia on consumption choices
by conducting a randomized field experiment. Analyzing the impact of information using
observational data would have been challenging because of potential endogeneity. Popular
products tend to attract more attention, and therefore, more information is available
about them. While the amount of information on Wikipedia tends to be correlated withthe products’ popularity, the information isn’t necessarily causing consumption, but may
instead be its byproduct. We overcome the identification problem using randomization.
We added content to randomly chosen Wikipedia pages in randomly chosen languages.
We measured the outcome using data on tourists’ overnight hotel stays in Spain. The
Spanish tourism sector is important in itself by accounting for almost 5% of Spain’s
1

See Aceto and Pescapé (2015), Borgman (2003), Kralisch and Mandl (2006), Mason (2017), Van Dijk
(2006), and Van Deursen and Helsper (2015).
2
Alexa Internet. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org, accessed September 23, 2017.
3
Page Views for Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Statistics.
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/
TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm, accessed September 23, 2017.
4This does not include indirect uses such as Apple’s Siri or Google.

2GDP.5 It also provided a good setting for the study, since the Spanish National Statistical
Institute collects information about overnight stays in Spanish hotels at the level of city,month, and tourist country of origin.
Our treatment added text and photos to the Wikipedia pages of Spanish cities indifferent language editions of Wikipedia. Most of the added text was translated from
Spanish Wikipedia. We focused on information that was relevant to tourists, such as
the city’s main sights and culture. We focused our attention on cities with rather short
Wikipedia pages. The randomization was done across city and language pairs. By varying
the information in different language editions of Wikipedia, we can isolate the causal
impact on tourists’ choices.
We find that information on Wikipedia has a sizable impact on consumption choices.
Our estimates show that adding about 2,000 characters (approximately two paragraphs)of text and one photo to a city’s Wikipedia page increased the number of nights spent inthis city by about 9% during the tourist season compared to cities in the control group.6
The effect comes mostly from pages that were initially relatively incomplete. In particular,
the treatment increases hotel stays by about 33% in cities which initially had very shortpages in a particular language, while there was no effect on city-language combinations
where the pages were well developed.
Using data on search activity from Google Trends and readership from Wikipedia
page views, we can shed some light on the mechanism that drives our findings. The
added information has no significant impact on search activity outside Wikipedia but
significantly increases the articles’ readership. That is, more detailed Wikipedia articles
gain more attention from potential readers. The size of this effect is similar in magnitude
to the effect on tourists’ choices.
5

Tourism statistics. Eurostat. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.
php/Tourism_statistics, accessed June 21, 2017.
6
Our experiment doesn’t allow us to distinguish between an absolute increase in demand (market
expansion) and substitution between control and treatment (business stealing). Some of the effect likely
arises from rerouting tourists from other cities. The implications we highlight in this paper hold in either
case.

3

Our results have three policy implications, which are likely to reach beyond the setting of our experiment. First, the results have implications on economic inequality andthe digital divide. Language can pose barriers that hinder efficient economic activity.
Language barriers have slowed innovation (Peri, 2005), decreased trade (Anderson andvan Wincoop, 2004), and affected investments (Grinblatt and Keloharju, 2001). In particular, languages create a major obstacle to access to information. Large differences
remain across languages in terms of information available online. Our results imply thatthese differences may lead to significant differences in economic behavior between various
groups.
Second, on the macroeconomic level, we show that online user-generated content canhave a significant causal impact on economic behavior and economic outcomes. The
treatment increased the number of hotel visits by 9%. If we extend this to the entire
tourism industry, the impact is large. In 2015, international tourists spent 270 million
nights in Spain. The same year international travel receipts equaled 51 billion euros in
Spain and 116 billion in the EU.7 While we cannot say whether online user-generated
content is changing the size of expenditures or reallocating them, its impact could be inbillions of euros.
Third, on the microeconomic level, our results highlight the importance of online presence. A 9% increase in consumption as a result of additional user-generated information
is substantial, given that each international tourist spends about 101 euros per day while
visiting Spain on average (García-Sánchez et al., 2013). The findings suggest that it isbeneficial to ensure that a city, firm, or product is accurately represented online in all
relevant languages.
The results of this paper pose a puzzle—why is the online presence so limited? Increasing online presence is relatively inexpensive, while our results suggest a high returnon investment. The online presence puzzle differs from most of the literature examining
7

Source: Tourism statistics. Eurostat. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/
index.php/Tourism_statistics, accessed June 21, 2017.

4contributions to online public goods.8 This literature finds that contributions exceed what
the economic theory would suggest. While the public goods literature assumes contributions are altruistic, we concentrate on a setting where the involved parties would benefit
from making more information available.
Our paper makes three methodological contributions. First, it is among the first
papers to use Wikipedia as a treatment in a field experiment for studying the impact on
behavior outside Wikipedia.9 Wikipedia provides a good ground for this since anyone canfreely improve it and the whole process is automatically recorded in the form of revisionhistories.10 Moreover, the readership of Wikipedia articles is well-recorded in the form of
page views.
Second, we use a novel dataset of real-life outcomes—overnight hotel stays. Most
importantly, this dataset provides a precise measure of demand of an identical productfor consumers from different countries. In Spain, hotels are legally required to record
guests’ country of residence. We obtained the data from the Spanish National Statistical
Institute aggregated to monthly level for each city and each country of origin. For example,
we know how many nights German tourists spent in a particular city in July 2015. We
use the fact that German tourists are more likely to get their information from German
Wikipedia and Italian tourists from Italian Wikipedia to map consumption choices backto their potential information sources.
Finally, we make a technical contribution to analyzing Wikipedia’s revision histories.
As our treatment adds information to Wikipedia pages, which can then be changed byother Wikipedia users, the first step in the analysis is to see how much of our additions are
modified by other Wikipedia users over time. For this, we use a diff algorithm describing
the shortest sequence of additions and deletions of characters to change the original text
to the revised one.11 We apply this algorithm twice. First, to quantify which parts of
8

See Lerner and Tirole (2003), Goldstein et al. (2008), Lacetera and Macis (2010), Ayres et al. (2013),
Chen et al. (2010), Zhang and Zhu (2011), and Algan et al. (2013).
9
There is literature examining the editing behavior in Wikipedia, which we will review below.
10
Editing Wikipedia requires following Wikipedia’s Terms of Use and policies.
11
For a description of the algorithm, see Myers (1986).

5the page our experiment added, and second, to measure how much of our additions had
survived after a few months. We find that our edits are rather persistent: about 93% of
our added text still existed about four months after the treatment. This could be because
information on the pages we edited was relatively scarce and (hopefully) our contributions
were considered sufficiently valuable by the Wikipedia community.
Our paper contributes to media economics literature studying the impact of media on
economic outcomes (for an overview see DellaVigna and La Ferrara (2016)). In particular,
our paper adds to studies on the impact of media on consumption. Most notably, Bursztyn
and Cantoni (2015) use geographic variation in access to Western TV to study its long-run
impact on East German consumption choices. The paper also contributes to studies on
the impact of new media and online user-generated content.12 Among others Chevalierand Mayzlin (2006) and Luca (2011) study how product reviews affect sales. Enikolopov
et al. (2018) analyze the impact of blog posts exposing corruption in state-controlled
companies on their market returns. Xu and Zhang (2013) study the impact of Wikipedia
on financial markets combining data of financial records, management disclosure records,
news article coverage, and Wikipedia editing histories. Our paper adds to the literatureby providing evidence of how Wikipedia informs consumers and affects their choices. It
differs from these papers in terms of the research method. The above papers use either anatural experiment or detailed observational data, while we conduct a randomized field
experiment which helps us to identify the effect.
Methodologically, our paper is related to a recent study by Thompson and Hanley(2017). In work concurrent and independent from ours, Thompson and Hanley (2017)
also conduct a randomized field experiment in Wikipedia. They find that Wikipedia
content affects scientific articles. Their work is complementary to ours—they find that
12

More generally, our paper relates to the literature on how ICT affects economic outcomes by changing
access to information. Among other topics, this literature has studied the impact of the Internet on
economic growth (Czernich et al., 2011), on labor market outcomes (Forman et al., 2012; Akerman et al.,2015), on the airline industry (Dana and Orlov, 2014; Ater and Orlov, 2015), the impact of medical records
on hospital costs (Dranove et al., 2014), and the impact of e-commerce on price dispersion (Ellison andEllison, 2009; Overby and Forman, 2014).

6

Wikipedia has a significant impact on knowledge production outside Wikipedia, whereas
we find that the available information affects consumption choices. Taken together, thetwo papers establish an important insight that is difficult to document without randomized
field experiments: the value of information on Wikipedia does not only derive from theentertainment value that readers obtain from consuming the content, but it is also valuable
input to economic choices. As the two papers illustrate, the content affects decisions inmany domains.
Our paper also relates to the emerging small branch of literature on information production on Wikipedia. Most of this literature analyzes contributions to Wikipedia (including Zhang and Zhu, 2011; Aaltonen and Seiler, 2015) and biases in Wikipedia (Greenstein
and Zhu, 2012; Greenstein et al., 2016; Greenstein and Zhu, 2018; Hinnosaar, 2019). Our
paper stresses the importance of understanding the Wikipedia production process and its
biases by quantifying the impact of Wikipedia on offline economic behavior.

2

Background on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an open-access Internet encyclopedia. It is the fifth most popular website in
the world.13 It is arguably one of the most important knowledge repositories and digitalpublic goods. Wikipedia is written by volunteers: anyone can create Wikipedia articles
or edit almost any of its existing articles.
While Wikipedia exists in 299 languages, the amount of available information differs
across languages. English Wikipedia is the largest, with over five million articles. Only
13 other language editions had more than a million articles in 2017.14
Such asymmetries are important because a significant share of the population canaccess information only in their mother tongue. For example, almost half of the population
13

Only Google, Youtube, Facebook, and Baidu are more popular than Wikipedia. The popularity ismeasured by the web traffic measurement company Alexa Internet (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/
wikipedia.org, accessed June 19, 2017).
14
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias, accessed June 19, 2017.

7

in the EU does not speak any foreign language.15 People who speak only one language
can only access the information from their native language Wikipedia. Figure A.1 shows
local language Wikipedia sizes and the percentage of the population speaking more than
one language. Language affects not only the topics covered but also the depth of coverage.
For example, among the 1,000 most important articles in Wikipedia16 the median text
length (relative to the corresponding page in English) varies from 5% in Latvian to 55%
in French (see Figure A.2). Not all topics are covered equally (see Figure A.3). Overall,
the worst covered topics are in categories like philosophy and religion (12%) and healthand medicine (13%).
The relevant implication for this paper is that the available information varies acrossthe language editions of Wikipedia, both in terms of the pages that exist and in termsof the depth of information in each topic it covers. Figure 1 presents an example: it
describes pages about Murcia, a large Spanish city, across the different language editionsof Wikipedia. This page exists in 84 different language editions of Wikipedia.17 The figure
contrasts the 20 longest versions of the Murcia page. Not surprisingly, the page is longest
in Spanish Wikipedia. In all other languages the page is at least five times shorter.

3

Experimental Design

We conducted a field experiment in which we added content (text and photos) to the
Wikipedia pages of Spanish cities in different language editions of Wikipedia. The randomization was done across city and language pairs. The outcome variable is the numberof overnight hotel stays by the tourists from the countries where the population speaks
one of the treated languages. We describe the experimental design below. Appendix C
provides additional detail.
15

About 46% of the population speaks only their mother tongue. (cf. Eurobarometer (2012)).
Wikipedia keeps a list of 1,000 vital articles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_
articles, accessed June 26, 2017).
17
Wikipedia data on Murcia was accessed on June 20, 2017.
16

8

Sample We restricted attention to four languages and tourists from the corresponding
countries: Dutch (the Netherlands), German (Germany), French (France), Italian (Italy).
Altogether we had hotel data from 135 Spanish cities. However, in many smaller cities,
hotel data was missing for some months and some tourist countries of origin. Hence, we
expected to encounter the problem of not being able to measure the effect of treatment
because of missing outcome (hotel) data. We were also concerned that our fixed length
treatment might not be strong enough in the case of very large cities which already had
long Wikipedia pages.
Therefore, we restricted attention to a sample of cities that satisfied two criteria. First,
the Wikipedia page for the city had to be relatively short—no more than 24,000 charactersin each of the four languages. Second, there could be no missing hotel data for the city.
Specifically, we required the data on hotel stays to exist for each month from May to
October 2013 and for all four countries of origin. Sixty cities satisfied these two criteria.
These restrictions gave us a sample of 240 Wikipedia pages (or city-language pairs).

Randomization We randomized across 240 Wikipedia pages (60 Spanish cities in four
languages). Our goal was to treat each city equally. Therefore, for each city, we treatedits page in two randomly chosen language editions of Wikipedia. In each language editionof Wikipedia, we treated 30 city pages. This resulted in a design where, for each city,some languages are assigned to the treatment and some to the control group. Similarly,
in each language, some cities are in the treatment and some in the control group.
To ensure balance in the treatment and control groups, we used a stratified randomization design. We ordered the 60 cities by the total number of tourists. Then we divided
the cities into ten groups of six cities each. Within each group, we randomly assigned
the city to one of six treatments. The six treatments were as follows: treat the city pagein one of the six possible language pairs (Dutch & German; Dutch & French; Dutch &Italian; German & French; German & Italian; French & Italian). Hence, 120 city pages
were treated and 120 pages remained as controls.

9

Treatment The pages were treated mid-August, 2014. The treatment added text andphotos to each page in the treatment group. The added text and photos were on topics
relevant for tourists, such as the city’s main sights and culture. The added text wastranslated mostly from the corresponding Spanish or English language Wikipedia pages
and photos were from the same source.
Our goal was to improve the Wikipedia pages, and we deliberately avoided decreasing
the quality of Wikipedia pages, for example, by deleting existing material. Our treatment
followed Wikipedia’s policies and added content that according to our understanding was
knowledge already approved by the editors of Spanish or English Wikipedia.

Survival of added material While editing German, French, and Italian Wikipedia
was not problematic, we were not successful in editing Dutch Wikipedia. Wikipedia
allows anyone to edit it. This also means that anyone can delete all or part of an article,
or undo the latest changes by reverting to a previous version. All our additions to Dutch
Wikipedia were deleted in less than 24 hours. That is, all Dutch Wikipedia pages were
essentially untreated from the point of view of a person reading these Wikipedia pages oraccessing these indirectly, e.g. through Apple’s Siri or Google information box. Therefore,
we exclude all Dutch Wikipedia articles from our main specification. However, we include
Dutch articles as non-treated in our robustness analysis and the results do not changemuch (see Table 4).
In table 1 we show that in the German, French, and Italian Wikipedias, our added text
and photos survived well. (The methodology for measuring the survival of our additions
is described in Section B.) Of the added text, on average 96 percent had survived by the
beginning of the month following treatment and 93 percent by the beginning of the year
following treatment. We interpret this in two ways. First, the edits were sufficiently persistent to provide hope that many people had seen the information our treatment added.
Strictly speaking, it is not necessary that the precise wording of our treatment survives—
it is to be expected that the other Wikipedia editors improve any added contributions

10

over time in terms of wording, references, or content. However, measuring the preserved
content is more difficult than measuring the actual text. Second, we hope that our treatment additions were considered useful by fellow Wikipedia editors; otherwise, they would
have either reversed the edits or further revised them.

Descriptive statistics Tables 2 and A.2, and Figure A.4 provide descriptive statistics
about the balance in our treatment. Table 2 shows that there were no significant differences in the main characteristics between the treatment and control groups. Table A.1
shows descriptive characteristics of the treatment. The median treatment added about
2,000 characters of text and one photo. The treatment added relatively more to pages
that were initially shorter (see Figure A.4). Table A.2 describes the initial page length
by language.
Next, we provide descriptive evidence about the outcome of interest. Figure A.5
presents the histogram of the logarithm of the number of hotel nights. It shows a considerable variation in the number of hotel nights. Figure A.6 represents the percentageof missing data by calendar month. As expected, hotel visits exhibit seasonality, withslightly above ten percent missing data from May to October and up to 40 percent in
December and January.

4

Results

Empirical strategy Our goal is to estimate the impact of additional information in
Wikipedia on hotel stays in the corresponding city by tourists from the corresponding
country. The main outcome variable is the logarithm of the number of hotel nights that
tourists from country (exposed to language) j spent in city i during month t. In our main
analysis, we estimate the following difference-in-differences regression:log(N ightsijt ) = α + βT reatmentijt + γXijt + CityLanguageF Eij + εijt

11

(1)

The variable of interest T reatment equals one for the treated city-language pairs during
the months after treatment and equals zero otherwise. The regression includes fixed
effects for city-language pairs CityLanguageF Eij and time varying control variables, Xijt .
The time varying control variables include: first, an indicator for period after treatment
interacted with language fixed effects to take into account tourist country of origin-specifictrends; second, an indicator for period after treatment interacted with city fixed effects
to take into account city-specific trend; third, logarithm of number of tourists from Spaininteracted with language fixed effects to take into account events in the city which leadto an overall increase in tourism. We cluster the standard errors by city-language pair.
Due to the missing data problem discussed above, in the main analysis, we restrict the
sample to May–October during each year 2010–2015.

Main results Table 3 presents the main results. Column 1 shows our estimates of
the treatment effect for the entire sample. According to these estimates, the treatment
increases the number of hotel nights on average by 9%. Column 2, adds an interaction of
the treatment variable and an indicator for Wikipedia pages that were initially relatively
short. The estimates in Column 2 show that our treatment increases hotel stays by about
33% in cities where the pages were initially very short in a particular language, while
there was no effect on cities with longer pages. Column 3 tries to explain the result byinteracting the treatment variable and an indicator for the Wikipedia pages to which we
added relatively longer text compared to the initial text length. As the length of the text
added was about the same, the treatment was relatively larger on initially short pages(Figure A.4). The results in Column 3 confirm that the effect is larger on pages where
the treatment was relatively larger.

Robustness In Table 4, we analyze the robustness of our main result. Columns 1–
5 repeat regression in Column 1 of Table 3, so the magnitudes of the estimates arecomparable. Our main result is robust to (1) different handling of missing observations,12(2) including our data from the canceled Dutch experiment, (3) including the wintermonths, and (4) adding different control variables.
Column 1 substitutes missing observations by zeros (only for city-year pairs wheredata exists for some month and tourist country of origin). It excludes the variables thatmeasure the number of tourists from Spain because the number of tourists from Spain isalso missing. The results are very similar.
Column 2 adds observations for tourists from the Netherlands. Recall that half of thecity pages in Dutch Wikipedia were assigned to treatment, but editing Dutch Wikipedia
proved infeasible since all pages in Dutch Wikipedia were returned to their pre-treatment
state within 24 hours. In column 2, we include the Dutch observations and consider themas untreated. The results are unchanged. We could estimate the same regression and add
a separate indicator variable for months after treatment only for Dutch pages assigned totreatment. The estimated treatment effect remains the same.
Columns 3 and 4 add the excluded months, and Column 4 substitutes missing observations by zeros.18 In Column 4, again, the variables that measure the number of tourists
from Spain are excluded. The results are similar, but in Column 3, less statistically precise. In Column 5 we test whether our results are driven by the choice of controls. We
add additional controls, namely, the logarithm of the number of tourists from the UK
interacted by language. The variables that measure the number of tourists from Spain
are excluded. The results are similar.
In Column 6 we analyze whether our main result is sensitive to our choice of thedependent variable. In this column, the dependent variable is the number of tourists fromcountry j divided by the number of tourists from country j plus those from Spain and theUK. Again, the variables that measure the number of tourists from Spain are excluded.
While the results are not comparable in magnitude, the treatment effect is positive andstatistically significant.
18

We substituted missing observations only for city-year pairs when data exists for some month andtourist country of origin.

13

Mechanism We analyze the mechanism by which additional information on Wikipedia
changes choices. We consider three main channels. First, additional information could
increase the conversion rate. That is, it could lead to a larger share of readers choosing
the destination. Second, the information could increase the number of readers. Third, it
could increase the underlying interest in the destination via indirect effects, such as wordof-mouth. We proxy the third channel using data from Google Trends. Google Trends
data measures how often a particular city is searched for on Google by the population of a
specific country. We can measure the combination of the first two channels using data on
the page views of Wikipedia articles. Unfortunately, we don’t observe whether this reflects
one person reading the page many times or many people reading it once.19 Therefore, wecannot distinguish between a higher conversion rate and a broader audience.
Table 5 presents estimates of analogous regressions as equation 1. In Columns 1–3,
the outcome variable is the logarithm of the number of page views of a Wikipedia page forcity i in language j during month t. In Columns 4–6, the outcome variable is the Google
Trend for city i from country j during month t. The estimates in Column 1 show thatthe treatment increased page views by about 11 percent. Column 2 separates the effectby the length of the article (before treatment), showing that the treatment effect is larger
on shorter pages. Similarly, the regression results in Column 3 show that the treatment
effect is larger on pages where our treatment added a relatively larger share of text (thesetended to be shorter pages). The estimates in Columns 4–6 show that our treatment did
not affect Google Trends (Google Search volume). Table A.3 verifies the robustness ofthese estimates.
Altogether, these results show that our treatment increases article readership, and theeffect is similar in magnitude to the effect on the number of hotel nights. We find noevidence that the Google Search volume increased. We conclude that the added content
on Wikipedia increased demand mostly through additional readership.
19

Wikipedia did not collect unique page views before 2015. Therefore we cannot distinguish between
new and returning readers.

14One possible channel for this effect is that the additional information made it easier to find relevant information about treated cities. To investigate this hypothesis, we
manually collected Google search rankings for each city/language pair. As the estimation
results in Table D1 Appendix D show, on average the search rankings increased by 7.75
positions, moving the average city from the third to the second page in the search results.
Unfortunately, we do not know what the search ranks were before our treatment, and how
long it took until the treated pages achieved a better search rank.
Our main finding suggests an online presence puzzle: since a relatively small increasein available information in Wikipedia may have a significant impact on tourist flows, one
would expect that interested parties, such as hotel employees, would be willing to improve
the online presence of a particular destination. There could be several reasons why thisdoes not happen more often. First, it requires computer skills and a clear understandingof the community guidelines, as well as knowledge of foreign languages, which may not
be readily available and therefore makes the process very costly. Second, the informationin Wikipedia is a public good, and the low appropriability of the investment in improving
its content gives incentives for free-riding.
We study this mechanism more closely in Appendix F, where we look at the correlations between page lengths, city population, number of tourists, and the number of hotel
employees. While this analysis cannot show a causal relationship, the results are consistent
with the free-riding hypothesis. Cities with a larger population and with more tourists
tend to have longer Wikipedia pages. Controlling for other variables, cities with fewer
hotel employees, and therefore lower incentive to free-ride, have longer Wikipedia pages.
This effect is statistically significant for Spanish and French Wikipedia but negligible inGerman, Italian, and Dutch languages.20
20

According to Eurobarometer (2012), 7% of Spanish residents know French as a foreign language wellenough to read newspaper or magazine articles. The same percentage is much lower for German (1%),
Italian (2%), and Dutch (0%).

15Limitations and future research Our study faces limitations and raises questions for
future research. First, our experiment was not designed to distinguish between a substitution (business stealing) and an increase in overall interest (market expansion). We would
expect that our estimated treatment effect is at least partly explained by substitution
from other possible tourist destinations. It appears unlikely that more information about
interesting destinations leads to a significant increase in the entire tourism sector. The
implications highlighted in the paper apply regardless of this ambiguity, though it would
be interesting to distinguish these two effects.
We study this issue carefully in Appendix E, where we use the fact that pages in
the control group in French, German, and Italian languages were exposed to a potential“business-stealing” shock, i.e. some of their neighboring cities were treated in these languages. However, pages in the Dutch control group, as well as pages in other European
Union languages, were not exposed to this shock. This comparison would be enoughto identify the business-stealing effect. However, our results show that we do not haveenough statistical power to estimate this. We cannot reject either that the estimates are
driven purely by business-stealing nor that they are driven solely by market expansion.
Second, there is a question of generalizability, as the results may be specific to thetypes of pages and languages used in the experiment. In our sample, the Wikipedia pages
were relatively short. We would expect that additional content would have less impact
when the relative improvement is small. Moreover, the presence of short Wikipedia pages
partly reflected the fact that these cities were not the most popular destinations. We would
expect that the impact of Wikipedia is smaller in the case of major tourist attractions.
On the other hand, these places were notable enough to have Wikipedia pages and toreceive regular tourist flows. It is unlikely that additional information could lead tourists
to destinations without exciting attractions. In the languages included in the experiment,
Wikipedia editions are still among the largest with relatively large readerships. The
availability of information in local languages is probably less relevant in countries where
people are used to obtaining information in English. Additionally, the countries in the16experiment send large tourist flows to Spain. This means there was already a preference
for Spain and left room for substitution that was discussed above. The absolute level ofthe treatment effect is likely to be smaller in the case of languages and countries where
Spain was not a popular tourist destination.
On a more positive note regarding generilizability, the impact of Wikipedia is unlikely
to be specific to the tourism industry. Instead, we would expect that the information on
Wikipedia affects choices and behavior in many domains.
Another natural question for further research is whether the additional content spurs
additional organic content. This question was addressed in a separate paper that uses
the data from the same experiment (Hinnosaar et al., 2019). This paper shows that theadded material has a relatively small effect on future content growth, suggesting thatedits to user-generated content should be undertaken solely based on their value rather
than possible externalities.

Comparison with other results from the literature. Our estimates suggest that
improved information in Wikipedia could lead to a 9% change in tourist choices of theirdestination. Other researchers in other settings have found various effect sizes. The only
experimental work studying the effect of Wikipedia outside of Wikipedia is the concurrent
and independent work by Thompson and Hanley (2017), who commissioned Wikipedia
articles in Chemistry and Econometrics, but only uploaded a subsample of 88 randomly
chosen articles, leaving the remaining articles as a control observation. They then compared text similarity to related scientific publications. They find that the Wikipedia
articles influenced the language in the associated articles significantly: 1 in 830 words was
influenced by the language in Wikipedia. While it is difficult to compare the magnitude ofthis effect with our results, their findings show that scientists use Wikipedia as a referencein their writing. Moreover, as there are spillover effects from scientific writing to othereconomic behaviors, these effects may be sizable.
The literature has also found sizable effects of media on consumption and financial

17

behavior. Bursztyn and Cantoni (2015) studied the impact of TV advertising using differential access of Eastern Germans to Western German TV before reunification. According
to their estimates, an exposure of one more minute of advertising per day resulted in
1.5% increase in consumption of advertised categories after the reunification. Berg and
Zia (2017) used a sample of 1,000 individuals in South Africa and encouraged half ofthem to watch a soap opera that had a subplot on debt-management. Treated individuals
were almost twice as likely to borrow from formal channels and less likely to engage ingambling.
Finally, there is significant evidence that consumer reviews have a large impact on
consumer behavior. Luca (2011) shows that an additional star in Yelp ratings increases
sales by about 5% for independent restaurants (and finds no impacts on chains). Similarly,
Anderson and Magruder (2012) find that an additional half-star in Yelp ratings causes
restaurants to sell out 49% more often.

5

Discussion

We found a significant causal impact of user-generated content on Wikipedia on real-life
choices. The estimated effect suggests that a well-targeted two-paragraph improvementof Wikipedia may lead to a 9% increase in tourists’ overnight visits. The median monthly
number of hotel nights spent by tourists from the three effectively treated countries to thecities in the control group was about 3,000 (during the six months from May to October).
This implies an increase of about 270 nights per month. Even if there were no tourists in
the remaining six months, this implies about 1,600 additional hotel nights per year.
What are the implications for the local economy? According to recent estimates(García-Sánchez et al., 2013), each international tourist visiting Spain spends about 101
euros per day on average. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that improving acity’s Wikipedia page can lead to approximately 160,000 euros of additional revenue per
year. This implies a considerable impact on local hotels and the overall local tourist
18

industry.
Our results highlight the importance of online presence. Ensuring that a city, firm, or
product is accurately represented in online information sources of all relevant languages
is relatively cheap, i.e. almost free or a few hundred dollars in mainly one-time costs.
In comparison, the 9%-increase in demand is rather large, suggesting a high return toinvestment.
Finally, the amount of information available in different languages varies significantly.
Our results imply that this may lead to large differences in economic decisions and economic outcomes as well. This opens up a more general discussion about economic inequality and the digital divide across cultural and ethnic groups.

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23

Figures

SpanishEnglishRussianGermanFrenchJapanese
Galician
CebuanoBelarusian (Taraskievica)
ItalianSerbianDutch
FinnishBelarusian
Vietnamese
TurkishBasquePolishChineseQuechua050,000100000
Text length

150000200000Figure 1: Length of a city page by Wikipedia language edition
Note: The page of the Spanish city exists in 84 Wikipedia language editions. Graph includes 20
languages in which the page is the longest.

24

Tables
Table 1: Survival over time of text and photos which we added to Wikipedia
French German Italian Total% text survived: 24h
100.0
94.7
100.0
98.2
% text survived: next month
98.7
90.2
99.9
96.3
% text survived: next year
95.1
86.7
97.5
93.1
% photos survived: 24h
100.0
96.2
100.0
98.8
% photos survived: next month 100.0
92.3
96.4
96.4
% photos survived: next year
100.0
88.5
92.9
94.0
Number of observations
30
30
30
90
Note: Unit of observation is a city page in a given language Wikipedia. Percentage of text
survived is calculated as described in section 3. % of text or photos survived is calculated overthree time periods: 24 hours, by the beginning of the next calendar month after treatment, by
the beginning of the next calendar year after treatment.

Table 2: Covariate balance table
Coefficient p-value
Log(Sum of tourists in 2013)-0.0020.958
Log(Number of tourists)-0.012
0.527
Tourist data missing
0.045
0.556
Log(Initial text length)-0.0000.994
Note: Dependent variable is the treatment group (an indicator that equals one if a city-language
pair is assigned to the treatment group and zero if it is assigned to the control group). Eachrow presents estimates from a separate regression of the form: T reatmentGroupi = Constant +βV ariablei +εi , where V ariable is listed in the first column. In rows 1 and 4, a unit of observation
is a city-language pair. In rows 2 and 3, a unit of observation is a city-language-month triplet
and the sample covers time period until treatment.

25

Table 3: Dependent variable: Logarithm (number of hotel nights)
(1)
(2)
(3)
Treatment
0.089**
0.002
0.039(0.045) (0.038) (0.045)
Treatment: Small page
0.332***(0.100)Treatment: Large % added
0.196*(0.099)City-Language FE
Yes
Yes
Yes
Adj. R-squared
0.245
0.248
0.246
Observations
5688
5688
5688
Note: Unit of observation is a month, city, and language (tourist country of origin) triplet.
Sample includes tourists from Italy, France, and Germany to the 60 cities in Spain in May–
October in 2010–2015. Treatment equals 1 for months after treatment for treated city-language
pairs, and 0 otherwise. Small page equals 1 if the initial page size is below the 25th percentile,and 0 otherwise. Large % added equals 1 if text added to the page (as a % of the initial text inthe page) is above the 75th percentile, and 0 otherwise. Controls include an indicator for period
after treatment interacted with language fixed effects, an indicator for period after treatment
interacted with city fixed effects, logarithm of number of tourists from Spain interacted withlanguage fixed effects. Standard errors (in parentheses) are clustered by city-language pair (180clusters). *** Indicates significance at the 1 percent level, ** at 5 percent level, * at 10 percent
level.

26

Table 4: Robustness

Treatment
City-Language FE
Log(Tourists from Spain)
Other controls
Adj. R-squared
Observations(1)
Add
missing
0.091**(0.045)
Yes
No
Yes
0.052
5724

(2)
(3)
Add
All 12
Dutch months
0.086*
0.064(0.047) (0.041)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
0.212
0.265
7584
9818

(4)
12 months,
add missing
0.078**(0.039)
Yes
No
Yes
0.002
11448

(5)
(6)
Add
Share ofUK
tourists
0.084*
0.007*(0.043) (0.004)
Yes
Yes
No
No
Yes
Yes
0.104
0.026
5688
5688

Note: Repeats the regression in column (1) in table 3. In columns 1–5, dependent variable islogarithm of number of hotel nights of tourists from a given country (Germany, France, Italy).
Column 1 substitutes missing observations by zeros (only for city-year pairs, when data exists
for some month and tourist country of origin). Removes variables of number of tourists from
Spain. Column 2 adds observations for tourists from the Netherlands, considers these all as nontreated. Column 3 adds remaining months. Column 4 adds remaining months and substitutes
missing observations by zeros (only for city-year pairs, when data exists for some month & tourist
country of origin), and removes variables of number of tourists from Spain. In column 5, adds
logarithm of the number of tourists from UK interacted with language. In column 6, dependent
variable is the number of tourists from country x divided by the number of tourists from country
x plus from Spain and UK, and it removes variables of number of tourists from Spain. Standard
errors (in parentheses) are clustered by city-language pair. *** Indicates significance at the 1
percent level, ** at 5 percent level, * at 10 percent level.

27

Table 5: Wikipedia page views and Google Trends

Treatment
Treatment: Small page
Treatment: Large % added
City-Language FE
Adj. R-squared
Observations

Log(Page Views)
(1)
(2)
(3)
0.116*** 0.070** 0.069**(0.030)(0.033)(0.032)0.219***(0.073)0.183***(0.069)
Yes
Yes
Yes
0.581
0.566
0.582
12709
12709
12709

Google Trends
(4)
(5)
(6)
-0.180 -0.415 -0.317(0.815) (0.862) (0.871)
0.892(1.655)0.537(1.634)
Yes
Yes
Yes
0.231
0.231
0.231
12709
12709
12709

Note: In columns 1-3, dependent variable is logarithm of Wikipedia page views. In columns
4-5, dependent variable is Google Trend. Unit of observation is a month, city, and language(country) triplet. Sample includes 3 languages (countries): Italian, French, and German. Sample includes 60 cities in Spain. Time period is 2010–2015 excluding August 2014 (treatment
month). Treatment equals 1 for months after treatment for treated city-language pairs, and 0
otherwise. Small page equals 1 if the initial page size is below the 25th percentile, and 0 otherwise. Large % added equals 1 if text added to the page (as a % of the initial text in the page)is above the 75th percentile, and 0 otherwise. Controls in all regressions include an indicatorfor period after treatment interacted with language fixed effects, an indicator for period after
treatment interacted with city fixed effects. In columns 1-3, Controls include logarithm of pageviews in Spanish Wikipedia interacted with language fixed effects. In columns 4-6, Controls
include Google Trends from Spain interacted with language fixed effects. Standard errors (inparentheses) are clustered by city-language pair (179 clusters). *** Indicates significance at the
1 percent level, ** at 5 percent level, * at 10 percent level.

28Online AppendicesA

Additional Tables and Figures
Table A.1: Descriptive statistics of treatmentmean
sd
p25 p50 p75 countLength of text added
2047.2 697.2 1671 2082 2377
90
Number of photos added
1.2
1.1
1
1
1
90
% of text added
43.2
37.9
18
29
56
90

Note: Unit of observation is a Wikipedia page in a given language (30 pages in each of the threelanguages: German, French, Italian).

Table A.2: Wikipedia page length before treatment, by language
Initial text length
p25 p50p75 countFrance2435 8336 13101
30
Germany 5483 9420 13387
30
Italy
2354 4974 8534
30
Total
2824 8098 11675
90
Note: Unit of observation is a city page in a given language Wikipedia. Sample includes pages
in the treatment group.

29

Table A.3: Robustness: Wikipedia page views and Google Trends
Page Views
Google Trends
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Add
Share of
Add
Share ofEnglish
views
UK
trend
Treatment
0.153*** 0.011*** -0.147
0.000(0.047)(0.004) (0.829) (0.005)
City-Language FE
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Controls: English-UK
Yes
No
Yes
No
Other controls
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Adj. R-squared
0.379
0.101
0.180
0.009
Observations
12709
12575
12709
12709
Note: The table largely repeats regressions in table 5. Dependent variable, in column 1, islogarithm of Wikipedia page views, and in column 2, the number of page views of the article inlanguage x divided by the sum of the number of page views of English, Spanish, and language x.
Dependent variable, in column 3, is Google Trend, and in column 4, Google Trend from country
x divided by the sum of Google trends from UK, Spain, and country x. Unit of observation isa month, city, and language (country) triplet. Sample includes 3 languages (countries): Italian,
French, and German. Sample includes 60 cities in Spain. Time period is 2010–2015 excluding
August 2014 (treatment month). Treatment equals 1 for months after treatment for treated citylanguage pairs, and 0 otherwise. Controls: English-UK include either logarithm of page viewsin English Wikipedia (column 1) or Google Trend from UK (column 3), all are interacted withlanguage fixed effects. Other controls include an indicator for period after treatment interactedwith language fixed effects, an indicator for period after treatment interacted with city fixed
effects. Standard errors (in parentheses) are clustered by city-language pair (179 clusters). ***Indicates significance at the 1 percent level, ** at 5 percent level, * at 10 percent level.

30

80
0

% of English Wikipedia
20
40
60

Swe

dish

an

m
Ger

ch
Dut

nch
Fre

Poli
n
enia hSlovDanisian
an vakLatv anian Estoni Slo
u
Lith

0

i
Finn

sh

sh

ek
Gre
Bu

Spa

nish Italian
Por

n
ch
Cze mania
Ro
ian
lgar

tugu

ese

Hun

20
40
60
% of population NOT speaking any foreign language

g a rian

80

Figure A.1: Size of Wikipedia and percentage of population not speaking any foreign
language
Note: The size is measured by the number of articles in the local language Wikipedia as apercentage to the number of articles in English language Wikipedia. Data source for language
skills is Eurobarometer (2012).

31

FrenchGermanSpanishItalian
Portuguese
Bulgarian
Greek
PolishHungarian
Dutch
SwedishFinnishCzech
Romanian
SlovenianDanishSlovakLithuanian
Estonian
Latvian
0

20
40
Text length of a median page (% from the page in English)

60

Figure A.2: Median article length by language
Note: The sample includes pages in the list of 1000 vital articles chosen by Wikipedia community.
For each page, the relative text length is calculated as the percentage of the length of text inthe local language Wikipedia compared to that of the English language Wikipedia edition. The
graph presents the median of the relative text lengths by language.

32

PeopleEveryday life
Mathematics
Science
Geography
History
Philosophy and religion
Technology
Society and social sciences
Arts and culture
Health and medicine
0

20

40

60

FrenchGermanItalian80
All

Figure A.3: Median article length by topic
Note: The sample includes pages in the list of 1000 vital articles chosen by Wikipedia community.
For each page, the relative text length is calculated as the percentage of the length of text inthe local language Wikipedia compared to that of the English language Wikipedia edition. The
graph presents the median of the relative text lengths by article category. For each category, it
presents the overall median and median by language (French, German, Italian).

33

200
Percentage of text added
50
100
150
0

0

10000
20000
Length of initial text

30000

Figure A.4: Length of text added (as % of initial text) vs length of initial text
Note: Unit of observation is a Wikipedia page in a given language (30 pages in each of the threelanguages: German, French, Italian). Sample includes treated pages.

34

8
6
Percent
4
2
0

0

5
10
Logarithm of hotel nights, control group

15

Figure A.5: Logarithm of number of hotel nights in the control group
Note: Unit of observation is a month, city, and tourist country of origin triplet. Sample includes
tourists from Italy, France, Germany to the 60 cities in Spain, but only the city-country of origin
pairs, which were assigned to the control group. The time period of the sample is May–Octoberin 2010 - 2015.

35

40
Percentage of missing hotel data
10
20
30
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Calendar months

Figure A.6: Percentage of missing hotel data, over 12 calendar months (January–
December)Note: Unit of observation is a month, city, and tourist country of origin triplet. Sample includes
tourists from Italy, France, Germany to the 60 cities in Spain, but only city-country of origin
pairs, which were assigned to the control group. The time period of the sample is 2010 - 2015.

36

B

Measuring Our Treatment and Its Survival

We applied a diff algorithm twice to quantify how much we added by our treatment
and how much of it was preserved a few months later. In particular, for each page wecompared three revisions that we took from the Wikipedia revision history: the last
revision prior to our changes (which we call pre-treatment revision), the last revision
created by our treatment (post-treatment), and version a few months later (survived). In
the revision history, the text is always in the Wikitext format, which means that someof it is not visible for the viewer. We normalized all the three revisions as follows. We
used Wikipedia’s built-in parser to get the html-version of the content, which we thenconverted to plain text by removing the html commands, i.e. removed all pictures, links,
etc. This gave us three texts.
The length of pre-treatment is our page length measure. To quantify the content addedby our treatment, we used a diff algorithm. It computes the smallest number of character
additions and deletions from pre-treatment to post-treatment. The algorithm outputs
which characters stayed the same, which ones were deleted, and which ones added. The
total length of the added text is our measure of treatment length. Finally, to computehow much of the text survived after the editing process a few months later we computed
diff from the added text to the survived text.21 See figure B1 for illustration.
Revision
Text Difference
Pre-treatment abc
Post-treatment adce diff(abc,adce)=ab::dce:
Survived
acef diff(de,acef)=::acef

Length3
Added 2 (de)::Survived 1

Figure B1: Illustration how we used diff algorithm to quanitify the additions by treatment
and the survival of the additions.

21

It is a slightly imperfect measure, as there could be some text that was deleted, but the algorithm isunable to differentiate it from the other parts of the page (that were unrelated to our treatment), but inexamples we checked by hand the results were accurate within a reasonable margin.

37

C

Implementation of the Experiment

Selection of pages and randomization: We chose the Spanish cities according to theavailability of data at the level of the city, month, and tourist country of origin from INE(Spanish National Institute of Statistics). The data set included monthly information
on nights spent in hotels of 135 Spanish cities, where the city is included in the sample
if it has at least three non-empty hotels. The overnight hotel stays in this data set
separate tourists by the country of origin, which was crucial for our experimental design.
The dataset reported the number of visitors from the United Kingdom, Japan, UnitedStates, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal; grouping the rest of thenationalities under the category “Other”. Out of this set of countries, we picked four forour treatment: German, French, Italian, and Dutch. These countries all have a languagethat is strongly associated with the population of the country. Moreover, at least one
member of our research team could verify the quality of texts in these languages.
Out of the 135 cities, we chose those with the pages shorter than 24,000 symbols ineach language of treatment and available data (no missing values) for the period May to
October 2013. Due to these criteria, the largest cities, including the capitals of provinces,for example, Madrid and Barcelona, as well as the smallest cities, with many missing
values in the Summer 2013 period, were not included in the experimental setting. On
the sample of remaining cities, we implemented the stratified randomization. We ordered
the cities by the number of tourists’ overnight stays and divided into groups of 6 cities,
such that every city in the group receives one of the 6 treatments: 1) treat Wikipedia
pages of the city in German & French, 2) in German & Italian, 3) in German & Dutch,
4) French & Italian, 5) French & Dutch, 6) Italian & Dutch. Overall, we had 10 groupsof cities. 60 cities were treated, each in 2 languages, which resulted in a sample of 120
treated city-language pairs and 120 controls.
Texts for treatment: To create texts for treatment of Wikipedia articles, we proceeded in three steps. In the first step, our research assistants with knowledge of English
38

and Spanish languages compared city pages in Spanish and English Wikipedia to findinformation that would be valuable for visitors of the city, especially in the following
sections:• Introduction• Climate• Main sights / Landmarks and Culture (including Festivals) / Culture and Sights /Tourism• Museums, Churches, Castles, Other Points of Interest• Transport / Traffic• Airport, Train, Road, Boats
The information in Wikipedia city pages follows a standard structure and the pagesof the Spanish cities are much more complete in Spanish than in other languages. For
example, if we compare the Spanish and English articles on Benalmadena, we see many
similarities in the composition of some sections: history, geography, sights.22 However, thedetails provided about sights are very short, almost bullet point, in the English version,
while being detailed in the Spanish version. Moreover, the Spanish version contains not
only the sights but also cultural events related to the city, which could also be relevant toEnglish-speaking readers. Wikipedia pages in other languages, such as French or Italian,
contain even fewer details than the English page.
Overall, research assistants were asked to find 3–4 paragraphs of information missing,which is about A4 page size. To simplify the translation to treatment languages, theytranslated the parts of this information that were available only in Spanish to English.
As the second step, we hired translators for each of the four treatment languages(French, German, Italian, and Dutch). We gave them the information in English collected22

See https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benalm%C3%A1dena for the Spanish page and https://en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Benalm%C3%A1dena for the English page in Wikipedia.

39

in the first step as well the information from the Wikipedia target page. Their task was
to translate parts from the material in English that were missing in the target language
so that the missing information could be added to Wikipedia pages in the corresponding
treatment languages. Further requirements were as follows:• The text can contain only correct information. The added text must be polishedand easily readable.
• The text should not repeat already existing information.
• The translation does not have to be a word-by-word translation. The names of theplaces and monuments etc. should be correct.
• The whole text did not need to look like a fully coherent story but could be acollection of paragraphs, where each paragraph provides information about some
topic.
As a result of this procedure, for each Wikipedia article covering a Spanish city in a
determined language of treatment, we had some new information to be uploaded to thearticle. The final step was to upload the resulting text to Wikipedia pages, carefully
merging it with the existing text.
Uploading texts: For uploading the new information to the corresponding city-language
articles on Wikipedia, we created 16 user accounts. Each account was randomly assigned
to a set of cities for uploading the content. The newly created content, as well as two
photos from the Spanish version of the article, were then uploaded to Wikipedia in midAugust, 2014.
Community reaction:

In the first day after the treatment, we checked the articles,

and in French and Italian language, no problems occurred. In German Wikipedia, an
administrator contacted us and asked about the purpose of the content uploads andwhether we have any commercial interest. We replied, providing information about our40institution and the research group, and about the research project. This response wassufficient. In Dutch Wikipedia, a single editor reverted all our edits within 24 hours.
We discussed the issue with this editor, but the editor was not willing to accept ourcontributions and therefore we decided to stop the uploads on the Dutch Wikipedia andaccept the reversions.

D

Quantifying Search Costs

In this appendix, we study the impact of the treatment on Google Search Rank of aparticular city. This data was collected in June 2019 by submitting searches in theformat “Turismo di Elche” (for each city in Italian, German, and French languages) andrecording the position of the first result from Wikipedia related to a particular location.
For example, for this specific search, the first result appeared in position 14 (second page,
position number four).
Table D1 shows that search ranks affiliated with the pages in the treated group are on
average about 7–9 positions higher than in the control group (which on average appear
at position 22.4). We interpret the increased visibility in search results as a reduction of
search costs.
Table D1: Dependent variable: Google Search Rank
(1)
(2)
Treatment-9.200*** -7.725**(3.472)(3.647)
City FENo
Yes
Language FE
No
Yes
Mean dependent variable
22.43322.433
Adj. R-squared
0.033
0.051
Observations
180
180
Note: The unit of observation is a city and language pair. The dependent variable isGoogle Search Rank for searches in the format “Turismo di Elche” in Italian, French,and German. Treatment equals one for treated city-language pairs and zeroes otherwise.
Standard errors (in parentheses), *** Indicates significance at the 1 percent level, ** at 5
percent level, * at 10 percent level.

41

E

Business Stealing vs. Market Expansion

A natural question to ask is how much of our results come from business stealing andhow much from market expansion. For example, our results are consistent with 4.5%
business stealing, i.e. rerouting tourists from the cities in the control group to the cities thetreatment group. But they are also consistent with 9% market expansion, i.e. increasing
the overall number of tourists to the medium-sized Spanish cities. Perhaps more plausibly,
it could be a combination of these two effects.
Our experiment was not designed to decompose these two effects. However, we canstudy this issue by using the fact that the pages in the control group in French, German,
and Italian languages were exposed to a potential “business-stealing” shock, i.e. some of
their neighboring cities were treated in these languages. The pages in the Dutch control
group (where the experiment was canceled), as well as pages in other European Union
languages, were not exposed to such shock. By comparing these two groups, we could
identify the business-stealing effect.23
To estimate it, we run the following regression, which is similar to our main differencein-difference specification:log(N ightsijt ) = β0 + β1 · F ranceGermanyItalyij · P ostT reatmentt(2)+ β2 · P ostT reatmentt + β3 · log(T ouristsF romSpainijt )+ β4 · log(T ouristsT oBarcelonaM adridijt ) + CityCountryF Eij + εijt

The sample consists of two parts: first, we take all observations in our control group, which
are untreated city-language pairs in French, German, and Italian, for which the variable
F ranceGermanyItalyij equals one; and second, control group in Dutch language (Column
1) or all other European Union countries (Column 2), for which F ranceGermanyItalyij
equals zero. The coefficient of interest is β1 , which should capture the business-stealing
23

We are grateful to the anonymous referee for this suggestion.

42

effect, i.e. by how much the number of tourists in our control group is lower than wewould predict by looking at tourist flows from other similar countries. To control forthe city-specific time trends, we include the logarithm of the number of tourists from
Spain going to the same city. To control for the country-of-origin-specific time trends, we
include logarithm of the number of tourists from the same country going to Barcelona
and Madrid (which are cities outside our sample). For the other European countries, due
to privacy-related data limitations, we have data only for the UK, Portugal, Belgium, andthen the remaining European Union countries altogether. We exclude Belgium because
it was partly treated by the treatment of French pages.
Table E1 reports our estimation results from this regression. Although the point
estimates would imply a sizable business-stealing effect of 2.6–5%, there is not enoughdata to precisely estimate the coefficients. In particular, we are unable to reject either of
the two extremes: that our main result is purely driven by business stealing or that it issolely driven by market expansion (i.e. reject business stealing).

43

Table E1: Measuring business stealing. Dependent variable: Logarithm (number of hotelnights)Control groups ofAdded otherFrance, Germany, Italy, European Union
Netherlands
countries(1)(2)
France, Germany, Italy × Post treatment-0.026-0.050(0.076)(0.048)
Post treatment
0.090
0.127***(0.063)(0.024)Log(Tourists from Spain)
0.363***
0.398***(0.038)(0.034)Log(Tourists to Barcelona, Madrid)0.802***
0.682***(0.074)(0.065)City-Country FE
Yes
Yes
Adj. R-squared
0.191
0.150
City-country pairs
120
300
Observations
3794
9293
Note: The unit of observation is a month, city, and tourist country of origin triplet. The
sample includes tourists to the 60 cities in Spain in May–October in 2010–2015. In column
1, the sample includes tourists from the control groups in France, Germany, Italy, and theNetherlands. Column 2 adds to the sample tourists from the UK, Portugal, and the remaining
EU countries (except Belgium) going to the 60 cities. PostTreatment equals 1 for the time
periods post-experiment. Log(TouristsFromSpain) is the logarithm of the number of tourists
from Spain going to the same city. Log(TouristsToBarcelonaMadrid) is the logarithm of thenumber of tourists from the same country going to Barcelona, Madrid. All regressions include
fixed effects for each city and country of origin pair. Standard errors (in parentheses) areclustered by city-country pair. *** Indicates significance at the 1 percent level, ** at 5 percent
level, * at 10 percent level.

44F

Descriptive Analysis of Page Lengths

In this appendix, we look at the descriptive statistics of page lengths of Wikipedia city
pages in different languages. We check their correlations with explanatory variables suchas the population of the city, the number of tourists, and also the number of hotel employees. This analysis allows us to address one possible explanation for the online presence
puzzle—interested parties, such as hotel managers, could consider the costs of increasing digital presence and the appropriability of the returns on this investment. As theinformation on Wikipedia is a public good, there is an incentive to free-ride and wait forsomeone else to contribute. For a fixed population size and the number of tourists, thefree-riding hypothesis would suggest that cities with fewer hotel employees should have
longer Wikipedia pages. To address this question, we run the following regression.

log(P ageLengthij ) = β0 + β1 log(HotelEmployeesi ) + β2 log(N ightsij )(3)+ β3 log(P opulationi ) + εij

The variable P ageLengthij is the length of the Wikipedia page of city i in language j,
HotelEmployeesi is the total number of hotel employees in city i, N ightsij is the numberof overnight stays by visitors from country j in city i, and P opulationi is the populationof city i. We use values from August 2013 for all variables. The coefficient of interest is
β1 , which would be negative under the free-riding hypothesis and zero otherwise.
Table F1 presents the regression estimates. While the analysis does not prove a causal
relationship, it is consistent with natural explanations. Cities with a larger population
have longer Wikipedia pages, but this effect is statistically significant only for Spanish
Wikipedia. Cities with more visitors from a particular country have longer pages in theirlanguage, but again the effect is significant only in the Spanish language.
Importantly, controlling for the population and the number of tourists, the cities withfewer hotel employees, have longer Wikipedia pages. This effect is statistically significant

45

only in the Spanish and French languages, which could be explained by language skills,
but also by the fact that due to data limitations for the number of hotel employees we havea relatively small number of observations. Altogether, this provides suggestive evidence
in favor of the free-riding hypothesis.
Table F1: Dependent variable: Logarithm (Wikipedia page length)
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Pages in Pages in Pages in Pages in Pages inGerman Italian
FrenchDutch
SpanishLog # Hotel Employees-0.088-0.309-0.690**-0.305-0.829***(0.206)(0.194)(0.279)(0.269)(0.145)
Log Tourist Overnight Stays
0.034-0.0190.236
0.168(0.107)(0.156)(0.196)(0.150)Log Spanish Overnight Stays
0.651***(0.173)Log Population
0.059
0.104
0.127
0.074
0.250***(0.077)(0.066)(0.085)(0.064)(0.076)
Observations
35
32
28
25
38
Adj. R-squared
-.071
.29
.27
-.049
.6
Note: The unit of observation is a city page in a given language Wikipedia in August 2013, one
year before the treatment. Each column samples Wikipedia pages in German, Italian, French,
Dutch, and Spanish, correspondingly, and shows whether the page length is correlated to thehotel industry measures to account for potential strategic considerations of the hotel managers incontributing to the online presence of the Spanish cities. The dependent variable is the logarithmof the number of symbols that a Wikipedia page contains. In columns (1)–(4) this measure ofpage length includes only the clean texts, while in column (5) the length of Spanish the pages
contains Wikipedia markup, due to data collection. Log Tourist Overnight Stays measures thenumber of tourists coming to the city from Germany, Italy, France, Netherlands, and Spanish
residents, correspondingly. Log # Hotel Employees measures the total hotel employees in eachcity. Log Population controls for the size of the city measured by the number of inhabitants in2012. Standard errors (in parentheses), *** Indicates significance at the 1 percent level, ** at 5
percent level, * at 10 percent level.

46