You can always start with the lists per country (if they exist). So for example I made an article about the first 500 of such a "1000 most important works of literature" list compiled for the Netherlands here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Dutch_Literature

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 10:44 AM, Thomas PT <thomaspt@hotmail.fr> wrote:
A maybe simpler metric: the top 1000 Wikipedia articles about works per page view.

Thomas

> Le 11 avr. 2017 à 09:42, mathieu stumpf guntz <psychoslave@culture-libre.org> a écrit :
>
> Hi Nemo,
>
> We may establish a list a the "1000 works that every Wikisource should have" (with translation possibly needed).
>
> What metric could we use to define such a list? Maybe reference frequency, but it requires statistics whose availability is unknown to me.
>
> Statistically,
> psychoslave
>
> Le 29/03/2017 à 08:30, Federico Leva (Nemo) a écrit :
>> One issue sometimes raised about Wikisource is how we know that we're working on the "right" books. Internet Archive is planning to textbooks starting from those which are most frequently assigned in USA schools:
>> http://blog.archive.org/2017/03/29/books-donated-for-macarthur-foundation-100change-challenge-from-bookmooch-users/
>>
>> I was surprised to learn a project like OpenSyllabus exists and works, I emailed them to ask what it would take to do the same for other languages/geographies.
>>
>> Nemo
>>
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>> Wikisource-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l
>
>
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