Two languages, one crash: english and russian Wikipedia attention to aviation accidents, 2015-2026

Abstract

When an aircraft crashes, its Wikipedia article is often viewed hundreds of thousands of times within days. An earlier study of English and Spanish Wikipedia found that attention to aircraft crashes depends on the number of deaths and, for accidents with many deaths, on the region of the airline, and that it fades within about a week. This study repeats the comparison for English and Russian Wikipedia. All 99 aviation accidents in Wikidata dated from August 2015 to September 2026 with both an English and a Russian article were selected, and daily page views for the first 30 days were collected for each article. For accidents whose operator, or crash country, was outside the former Soviet Union, the Russian article was written within two days in only 34 of 70 cases; for post-Soviet accidents, in 20 of 25. In the 50 events where both articles existed from the start, the median ratio of English to Russian views was 19.0 for accidents outside the former Soviet Union and 1.7 for post-Soviet ones (Mann-Whitney test, p < 0.001). Because English Wikipedia as a whole received about 8.8 times as many views as Russian Wikipedia in the same periods, the ratios were also divided by this edition-size baseline: relative to its size, Russian Wikipedia gave post-Soviet accidents about five times the expected attention and other accidents about half of it. Attention faded at a similar speed in both languages: about three quarters of the 30-day views came in the first week, and daily views fell below a tenth of the peak after a median of 7 days. The results show that Russian-language attention to aviation accidents is concentrated on accidents close to the Russian-speaking world.

Keywords: Wikipedia, online attention, aviation accidents, Russian language, page views

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Дәйексөз келтіру үлгісі

Binom School named after Kadyr Myrza Ali, Astana, Kazakhstan Two languages, one crash: english and russian Wikipedia attention to aviation accidents, 2015-2026 // Central Asian Scientific Journal. – 2026. – No. 4(32), Vol. 2. – Pp. 202–207.