Introduction
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine kicking off in February of 2022, there has been a surge of weapons being sent to Ukraine by Western nations. There has especially been a major focus on man-portable weapon systems with anti-tank and anti-air capabilities as these are seen as more cost-effective and more easily transportable ways to get these kinds of capabilities to Ukraine. This would be in comparison to sending them more expensive and larger things like tanks and jet fighters. One of the weapon systems that has been highlighted by many different major media outlets is the Javelin missile system. Officially known as the FGM-148 Javelin (AAWS-M), the weapons are being provided by the United States and some other nations in large quantities. The Javelin is an American-made portable anti-tank missile system that uses a fire-and-forget design with infrared guided missiles with a warhead designed to defeat modern tank armor by hitting its target from above where the armor is thinnest. It has seen combat usage in various conflicts, such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it is most recently seeing use to destroy Russian armored vehicles in Ukraine. It is of interest to see how the increase in interest in the Javelin can be seen in Wikipedia data.
Data
Wikipedia is a multilingual free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through a model of open collaboration, using a wiki-based editing system. Many users of the internet have defaulted to Wikipedia pages to learn more about anything of interest to them. This can be seen as most Google searches of a topic show the relevant Wikipedia page as one of the top results. The page for the Javelin is titled “FGM-148 Javelin” and the page also exists in languages other than English. The page contains all kinds of information about the weapon system, from the history of its development to a list of the known operators of the system. Data was collected from the English version of this page as well as the Russian version through Wikipedia’s API and this data was analyzed to see how interest may have changed for this topic.
Javelin Page Views
The page views for the FGM-148 Javelin over time was collected for both the English and Russian versions of the page and this data was used to create the line plot seen above. From this, it can be seen that for most of the time, the number of page views is very low and appears to hug close to 0. It can also be seen that page views for the Russian version of the page seem to be lower than the views on the English page for the most part. This may suggest that Russian speaking users have lowered interest in this American-made weapon system. It may also be a result of some manipulation by the Russian media to direct attention away from these kinds of weapons. However, this may also just be a result of there being more English speakers than Russian speakers at 1.45 billion and 258 million respectively. It can also be seen that there is a jump in English page views around October 2019 and November 2019. This is most likely due to Ukraine announcing around this time that they have signed a deal to purchase 150 missiles and 10 launchers of the Javelin system. It was also around this time that a lot of attention was being brought on Javelins by media outlets as a part of their coverage of Trump’s impeachment hearings. This was due to Javelins being a part of the discussion between Presidents Trump and Zelensky that led to the whistleblowing incident that ultimately led to the impeachment hearings.
The above line plot shows the same page view data but only views ranging from 2021/11/01 to 2022/03/30 is shown in order to more easily see how the page view data has changed during this smaller period. Here it can be seen that there is a significantly large surge in views in both English and Russian at the end of February. This can largely be attributed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine beginning on February 24, 2022. You can see that English views have jumped from just a few thousand to over 100,000 at this time. Russian views also jumped from a few thousand to almost 30,000. After this initial major surge in views, the pages maintained heightened viewage for a time but it has also constantly dropped over time. Currently, there seems to not be nearly as much interest in the Javelin compared to the earlier days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Conclusion
It can be seen that there has been a surge of page views for the FGM-148 Javelin whenever the Javelin has a significant presence in media coverage, such as during announcements of purchase, impeachment coverage, and war coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The significant increase in interest in the Javelin in February 2022 compared to the increase in late 2019 is likely due to the significant combat usage of the Javelin in the war. The war in Ukraine is a rare example of these kinds of weapons being used against a modern military and the Javelin has shown great effectiveness in its ability to destroy Russian armor. It can likely be surmised that the surge in interest comes from the world-wide interest in the war in Ukraine and curiosity of the weaponry being utilized by Ukrainians against the Russians.
