Wikipedia readers turned to American Airlines Flight 11 at 87x the usual rate

What this article is

American Airlines Flight 11 (AA11) was an American domestic passenger flight from Logan International Airport in Boston to Los Angeles International Airport in California that was hijacked by five al-Qaeda terrorists on the morning of September 11, 2001, as part of the September 11 attacks. The hijacked airliner was deliberately crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex in New York City, killing all 92 people aboard the flight, and resulting in the deaths of more than 1,300 people within the skyscraper's top 18 stories, in addition to causing the deaths of numerous people below the trapped floors.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "American Airlines Flight 11", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 43 edits to this article on 2026-09-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Flight
• Crash
• Aftermath
• Boston, Massachusetts
• Hijacker's transmissions

What changed that day

The article lost 1,100 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 315 characters to Boston, Massachusetts. See everything that changed on 2026-09-11 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.