How it Works
Transparency is key to understanding our rankings. Here is exactly how we measure cultural significance and trending interest for over 5,000 books.
Measuring Global Significance
We define “Significance” through the lens of global cultural reach. The primary metric we use is the Wikipedia Sitelink Count.
What is a Sitelink?
A sitelink is a connection between a Wikidata item (like a book) and its corresponding article on various language versions of Wikipedia. If a book has articles in 50 different languages (English, French, Japanese, Swahili, etc.), it has a sitelink count of 50.
This acts as a powerful proxy for global impact: the more languages a book is notable enough to have an article in, the more culturally significant it is considered on a global scale.
The Trending Score
Our “Trending” rank is updated every 24 hours based on real-time reader data from the Wikimedia Foundation. It combines two factors:
- Volume (70% weight): The total number of pageviews across the last 30 days.
- Velocity (30% weight): The rate of growth in viewership. A book getting 10% more views this week than last week will climb higher.
Note: We filter out bot traffic and non-human access to ensure the data reflects genuine human interest.
Our Data Sources
We rely entirely on open-source, community-driven data. No single person or algorithm decides what is significant; the world's collective curiosity does.
Our Mission
LikedBook is designed to help you discover the books that have shaped human history and continue to influence our world today. By using objective readership and notability data, we provide a window into what the world is reading right now.