Nation image and its dynamic changes in Wikipedia

PurposeIn this volatile and increasingly fast-revolving world, it has become crucially important to monitor, measure and manage nation image and its dynamic changes in real time. However, few studies have been conducted on a model to measure the image and/or its changes. The purpose of this paper is to find an economically affordable methodology to measure nation image and its changes online in real time.Design/methodology/approachThe study took an approach to build dynamic ontology that may reflect to change nation image in real-time. With it, the authors attempted to measure nation image in real time.FindingsAmong many social media, the authors found that Wikipedia is particularly suitable for the purpose of measuring nation image. An ontology of nation image was built from the keywords collected from the pages directly related to the big three exporting countries in East Asia, i.e. Korea, Japan and China. The click views on the pages of the countries in two different language editions of Wikipedia, Vietnamese and Indonesian were counted.Originality/valueThe study confirms the objective: the data from a social media service, Wikipedia, may work very well as an economically affordable real-time supplement to offline nation image indices that are currently used.