Wikipedia readers turned to Assassination of William McKinley at 99x the usual rate

What this article is

William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States, was shot on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in the Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901, six months into his second term. He was shaking hands with the public when an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, shot him twice in the abdomen. McKinley died on September 14 of gangrene caused by the wounds. He was the third American president to be assassinated, following Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and James A. Garfield in 1881.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Assassination of William McKinley", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 17 edits to this article on 2026-09-06, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• A day at the fair; excursion to Niagara Falls
• Apparent recovery; eventual death
• At the Temple of Music
• Background
• Plans and arrivals
• Operation

What changed that day

The article lost 221 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 73 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-09-06 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.