How this works
Wikipedia articles whose readership just surged — measured against their own 60-day baseline, updated daily.
The measurement
Every day, Wikimedia publishes pageview counts for every Wikipedia article. WikiSpikes takes the most-read articles for the latest completed day and compares each one against its own trailing 60-day median. An article reading far above its own normal is a surge.
The median is used rather than the mean so that an earlier spike in the window
cannot flatten a later one. Counts are filtered to agent=user, which
excludes bots and crawlers.
What gets published
An article appears here when it draws at least 50,000 views in a day AND at least 10 times its own median. Articles whose normal traffic is too small to support a reliable multiple — under 100 views a day — are judged on volume instead, and publish only above 100,000 views.
What the ~ means
A multiple written as ~2,590x rather than 2,590x is real but imprecise, and the tilde is there to say so.
It appears when an article's normal traffic is very low. If a page usually draws four views a day and suddenly draws 260,000, the multiple is enormous — but it is also unstable: one extra visitor on an ordinary day would move it by a fifth. The surge is genuine and worth reporting. The precise multiple is not worth trusting, so those pages lead with the view count instead, which is solid either way.
A page normally read by thousands does not have this problem, and its multiple is shown plainly.
What this does not claim
This site reports that an article's readership rose. It does not claim to know why. Where context is shown — the article's own summary, or what editors changed that day — it is presented as evidence for you to weigh, not as a cause. A surge and its explanation are different things, and only one of them is measured here.
One surge, one page
Interest in a subject usually lasts several days. Rather than publishing a new page every morning, each surge gets one page that updates while it runs and is closed once readership returns to normal.
Sources
Pageview data comes from the Wikimedia REST API. Article summaries and edit histories come from Wikipedia and are available under CC BY-SA 4.0.