WHICH NAME DO READERS STILL USE? FORMER NAMES OF RENAMED KAZAKHSTANI CITIES IN RUSSIAN AND KAZAKH WIKIPEDIA PAGE VIEWS, 2015–2026

Several cities of Kazakhstan have changed their names: Semey was Semipalatinsk until 2007, Astana was Nur-Sultan from 2019 to 2022, and Konaev was Kapshagay until 2022. This paper asks how many readers still reach the Wikipedia article about such a city through a former name, how fast that share falls, and whether it differs between the Russian and the Kazakh Wikipedia. A title that only redirects to the article keeps its own count of page views, so the views of each former name can be separated. The study uses monthly page views of human readers from the public Wikimedia Pageviews API for 88 titles from July 2015 to September 2026, for the 14 cities and their names in the author's own list. Before the full data were downloaded, and with only the two Semipalatinsk figures quoted when the study was proposed to him, the author forecast that Nur-Sultan would fade fastest, that Semipalatinsk would last longest, and that former Russian names would be almost absent from the Kazakh Wikipedia. In the Russian Wikipedia in 2025, 6.4% of the views of the Semey article came through Semipalatinsk, 3.3% of the views of the Konaev article through Kapshagay and 1.2% of the views of the Astana article through Nur-Sultan. Over 2023–2025 the share through Nur-Sultan fell by about 20% a year and, less clearly, through Kapshagay by about 9%, while the shares through Semipalatinsk and through redirects that are other spellings and Kazakh forms of current names did not fall. Over 2016–2025 the Semipalatinsk share halved, but such redirects also lost share (4% to 12% a year), so how much of this decline is the name fading cannot be separated. In the Kazakh Wikipedia the two former Russian names that exist, Semipalatinsk and Alma-Ata, carried 0.18% and 0.09% of views in 2025. Kapshagay, which exists there in Kazakh spelling, had a median monthly share of 3.05% in 2023–2025, close to its 3.65% in the Russian Wikipedia, while Nur-Sultan, also in Kazakh spelling, stayed below 0.4% a year in 2023–2025. Former names of Kazakhstani cities remain a route by which a minority of readers reach the city articles, mostly in the Russian Wikipedia.