2018 FIFA World Cup is drawing 4.6x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

The 2018 FIFA World Cup was the 21st FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial world championship for national football teams organised by FIFA. It took place in Russia from 14 June to 15 July 2018, after the country was awarded the hosting rights in late 2010. It was the eleventh time the championships had been held in Europe and the first time they were held in Russia, also featuring one or two venues, depending on definition, located across the boundary with Asia. At an estimated cost of over $14.2 billion, it was the most expensive World Cup ever held until it was surpassed by the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "2018 FIFA World Cup", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 2 edits to this article on 2026-07-07, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Host selection criticism

What changed that day

The article lost 1,217 characters on balance that day. See everything that changed on 2026-07-07 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.