Wikipedia articles on plane crashes show what we remember

Oxford University researchers have tracked how recent aircraft incidents or accidents trigger past events and the factors making some consistently more memorable than others. Using the English version of Wikipedia, they analysed articles about airline crashes between 2008 and 2016. They then measured how the traffic to articles about airline crashes or incidents before 2008 changed due to more recent events. They analysed page views of nearly 85,000 pairs of articles (which they named as "source articles" and "target articles") and found there was a short-term attention span for recent crashes. More people appeared to look at articles about past crashes they remembered when their memory was triggered by the recent event. The researchers' model shows that, on average, when target events from the past are combined, they attract 142 percent more page views than articles about the original source events. Their mathematical model, presented in the article, allows the researchers to find, for example, that the case of the co-pilot who in 2015 deliberately crashed a plane on a German flight, led to three times more views of a 'target' article about an incident in 2001 in New York in which pilot error played a part. The researchers also discovered that interest slumps to near zero in articles about aircraft incidents that happened more than 45 years ago.