What triggers human remembering of events? A large-scale analysis of catalysts for collective memory in Wikipedia

Abstract

Going beyond its role as an encyclopedia, Wikipedia becomes a global memory place for high-impact events, such as, natural disasters and manmade incidents, thus influencing collective memory, i.e., the way we remember the past. Due to the importance of collective memory for framing the assessment of new situations, our actions and value systems, its open construction and negotiation in Wikipedia is an important new cultural and societal phenomenon. The analysis of this phenomenon does not only promise new insights in collective memory. It is also an important foundation for technology, which more effectively complements the processes of human forgetting and remembering and better enables us to learn from the past. In this paper, we analyse the long-term dynamics of Wikipedia as a global memory place for high-impact events. This complements existing work in analysing the collective memory negotiation and construction process in Wikipedia directly following the event. In more detail, we are interested in catalysts for reviving memories, i.e., in the fuel that keeps memories of past events alive, interrupting the general trend for fast forgetting. For this purpose, we study the trigger of revisiting behavior for a large set of event pages by exploiting page views and time series analysis, as well as identify of most important catalyst features.