The 2020 bot label change causes half of the apparent 2016–2025 decrease in English Wikipedia attention time after 4,547 notable deaths, and the time did not decrease after mid-2020

Question: did attention to English Wikipedia articles after the deaths of notable people become shorter from 2016 to 2025? Data: a random sample per year of people in Wikidata who died in 2016–2025 and have 10 or more sitelinks (9,043 people; 4,547 after quality filters), with daily pageviews from 90 days before to 300 days after the death. Measure: T90, the days from the peak until 90% of the 90-day excess views above the pre-death baseline. Results: with the published 'user' label, median T90 decreased from 20 days (2016–2019) to 15 days (2021–2025), a trend of −2.7% per year (95% CI −3.6 to −1.9; errors clustered by month of death). On 2020-04-29 Wikimedia started to label some bot traffic 'automated'; before, it was 'user'. For all 2,292 sample deaths after June 2020 we added the automated views back. This made T90 longer by 8.4% (CI 7.6–9.4%). On this label-consistent series the median T90 decreased from 20 to 17 days (difference −3, CI −4 to −1) and the trend was −1.35% per year (CI −2.2 to −0.5), half of the user-label trend. The lowest values were in 2020–2021, and after June 2020 T90 did not decrease (+1.9% per year, CI −0.6 to +4.4). Larger peaks relative to the baseline explain most of the remaining trend: with peak size, baseline popularity, sitelinks and age as controls, the trend was −0.5% per year (CI −1.4 to +0.4). The next-day-to-peak ratio (0.46 in 2016, 0.44 in 2025) and the attention level 1 and 6–9 months later had no trend. Thus death bursts did not show the slower decay that an earlier SCI study found for top-list bursts. Limitations: the correction assumes that post-2020 'automated' traffic is the same kind of traffic that was in 'user' before 2020; English Wikipedia only; people with 10 or more sitelinks only; the follow-up analyses were added after the first results.

collective attention · Wikipedia pageviews · attention decay · death · Wikidata · bot traffic · data artefact · acceleration of attention · collective memory