2009 Fort Hood shooting saw 150x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

On November 5, 2009, a mass shooting took place at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas, United States. Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others. It was the deadliest mass shooting on an American military base and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since the September 11 attacks until it was equalled by the San Bernardino attack in 2015.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "2009 Fort Hood shooting", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

What changed that day

The article lost 5 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 23 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-10-06 in Wikipedia's own diff view — that is where the reason for a surge is usually visible, written and sourced by the editors who were following the story.

How this was measured

Views are Wikimedia's own pageview counts for en.wikipedia, filtered to agent=user so automated traffic is excluded. The baseline is the median of the previous 60 days, which is used instead of the mean so that an earlier surge cannot flatten a later one. The multiple is the day's views divided by that median.