English Wikipedia attention peaks became slower from 2016 to 2025 in daily top-50 data; French and German slowed less and Japanese did not change

Lorenz-Spreen et al. (2019) found that collective attention rises and falls faster over time in several media, but not on English Wikipedia in 2012-2017. We tested whether this acceleration appeared on Wikipedia in 2016-2025. We used Wikimedia Pageviews API data (agent = user): daily top-1000 lists for English (all-access, desktop, mobile web, mobile app), German, French and Japanese, and 121-day view series around 20,000 sampled top-50 peaks (English 800 per year, other languages 400 per year). In English, daily top-50 turnover with persistent articles removed decreased from 0.551 in 2016 to 0.463 in 2025 (slope -0.0101 per year, 95% CI -0.0135 to -0.0068 with years as units), on all access methods. In English mobile-web peaks, the median relative fall on the day after the peak decreased from 2.46 (2016-2017) to 1.70 (2024-2025), the share of peaks that lost half of their excess views in one day decreased from 0.752 to 0.652, and the share of excess views after the peak increased. Most of the English change occurred in 2016-2021; it is present within 2016-2019, before the April 2020 change in bot classification, and slopes in 2021-2025 are near zero. French turnover and peak falls slowed slightly, German turnover slowed slightly with no clear change in peak shape, and Japanese did not change. No tested language or English access method showed acceleration. Limits: daily UTC resolution, top-50 items only, four languages, possible residual automated traffic, and no causal test.

collective attention · Wikipedia · pageviews · attention dynamics · turnover · popularity · time series · cross-language comparison · replication