Plane crashes: public only interested if toll 50 or higher, study finds

Researchers at Oxford Internet Institute examine Wikipedia articles about some 1,500 crashes around the world

The MH17 crash site in eastern Ukraine
The MH17 crash site in eastern Ukraine. Analysis of Wikipedia found that its article about the crash was the most read across all the factors assessed. Photograph: Robert Ghement/EPA

The public is interested in plane crashes with a death toll of 50 or higher, research suggests.

An University of Oxford study released on Wednesday found that the more people who die in a plane crash, the greater the interest, with a death toll of about 50 the minimum threshold for significant levels of public interest.

But when a crash killed fewer than 50 people, researchers found it was difficult to predict how much interest there would be.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute studied page views and edits of Wikipedia articles about some 1,500 plane crashes around the world to gauge interest. The events dated from 1897 to 2016.

Other factors that played a part were the amount of media coverage given over to the crash immediately afterwards and the location of the operating airline.

The paper, published in the Royal Society Open Science, also found that the location of an airline company’s headquarters trumped interest in the death toll if it was in North America. A North American event triggered about 50 times more attention among readers of the English edition of Wikipedia than an African one.

The same applied in the Spanish edition of Wikipedia for Latin American airlines, which triggered about five times more attention than a North American event – regardless of the death tolls.

Crashes involving airlines based in other regions needed three times the death toll of a North American airline and five times that of a Latin American airline to command similar levels of attention from the two editions of Wikipedia.

But even interest in large death tolls was found to be fleeting. In three-quarters of the articles studied, views dipped sharply within just a week of the page’s creation.

Wikipedia also amplified decisions taken by western media as to which crashes merited attention, with edits often made to link to coverage on external news sites.

Dr Taha Yasseri said the findings were proof that even open systems such as Wikipedia were subject to bias. “We see that English Wikipedia continues to be shaped by things that matter to westerners, with little reference to the rest of the world outside of North America and Europe,” he said, adding: “One should be very careful using and relying on the information from the ‘sum of human knowledge’ –as it’s claimed to be.”

Previous research had shown that only about half of the editorial activity on English Wikipedia originated from North America, Yasseri said, adding that English could be considered the site’s common tongue.

“We would expect similar biases in different language editions of Wikipedia, but numbers of events covered in other languages are not large enough to give us statistically solid results.”

Analysis of Wikipedia in English and Spanish found that its article about Malaysia Airlines flight MH17’s crash in Ukraine was the most read across all the factors assessed. Nearly 300 people died when the passenger plane was shot down in July 2014.

The other most-read stories were also consistent across both language editions: the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared in 2014 with 298 people on board, and the Air France flight 447 that crashed en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, killing 228 people.