Dynamics and biases of online attention: the case of aircraft crashes

Abstract

The Internet not only has changed the dynamics of our collective attention but also through the transactional log of online activities, provides us with the opportunity to study attention dynamics at scale. In this paper, we particularly study attention to aircraft incidents and accidents using Wikipedia transactional data in two different language editions, English and Spanish. We study both the editorial activities on and the viewership of the articles about airline crashes. We analyse how the level of attention is influenced by different parameters such as number of deaths, airline region, and event locale and date. We find evidence that the attention given by Wikipedia editors to pre-Wikipedia aircraft incidents and accidents depends on the region of the airline for both English and Spanish editions. North American airline companies receive more prompt coverage in English Wikipedia. We also observe that the attention given by Wikipedia visitors is influenced by the airline region but only for events with a high number of deaths. Finally we show that the rate and time span of the decay of attention is independent of the number of deaths and a fast decay within about a week seems to be universal. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of attention bias.

The impact of news exposure on collective attention in the United States during the 2016 Zika epidemic

“…While previous studies have focused on newspaper coverage of epidemics 31 , we investigated the relationship between the exposure to TV coverage and online news, and the attention to Wikipedia pages. Our study confirms the high sensitivity of Wikipedia searches to breaking news and official announcements, in particular in the case of disaster events, as found by previous studies 32,33 . On the other hand, the temporal dynamics of Wikipedia page views during the 2016 ZIKV epidemic showed a nonlinear dependence with media coverage: the Wikipedia pages activity was high in the initial phases of the outbreak, but it declined more quickly than media coverage.…”

“…Previous works have investigated the effects of external events on the activity of Wikipedia editors and on the number of pageviews 41,42 . More generally, the characterization of the usage of Wikipedia as a source of information and as a proxy for measuring the global attention to realworld events has been studied 22,33,43,44 . The results of our study add further evidence of the value of Wikipedia data in the field of digital epidemiology, especially for capturing information seeking behavior, and attention patterns during disease outbreaks 45 .…”

The memory remains: Understanding collective memory in the digital age

“…The view flow is calculated over the week after the first edit of the source article. In particular, we focus on the first week where the attention is expected to be maximal ( 30 ). Note that any area below the dashed line will count negatively, so the view flow can theoretically be negative as well.…”

“…This was done to avoid false positives, that is, small sources that are credited with the view flow triggered by large source events. We defined proximity by a 10-day range because the main attention of an aircraft event has been shown to decay over this time scale ( 30 ). The process of removing false positives was performed as follows: (i) we sorted all the source articles by their total number of views during the first week in Wikipedia; (ii) starting from the article with the most views, we removed all source articles that were created within a 10-day range; and (iii) we continued with the next article with the highest views and repeated (ii) and so on.…”

The 2019 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: ensuring that the health of a child born today is not defined by a changing climate

“…The second indicator tracks engagement -seeking behaviour on the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. 181 Because of its accessibility, breadth and user trust, Wikipedia is one of the most widely-used online resources. [182][183][184][185][186] Recognising that that climate change is harming people, the global public support government action to limit GHG emissions.…”