Wikipedia readers turned to 2022 FIFA World Cup at 4.0x the usual rate

What this article is

The 2022 FIFA World Cup was the 22nd FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial world championship for national football teams organised by FIFA. It took place in Qatar from 20 November to 18 December 2022, after the country was awarded the hosting rights in 2010. It was the first World Cup to be held in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula, and the second in an Asian country after the 2002 tournament in South Korea and Japan.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "2022 FIFA World Cup", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 3 edits to this article on 2026-07-07, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• LGBTQ and women's rights

What changed that day

The article lost 8 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.