Wikipedia readers turned to Betty Broderick at 86x the usual rate

What this article is

Elisabeth Anne Broderick was an American woman who murdered her ex-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III and his succeeding wife, Linda, on November 5, 1989, as an act of revenge after Daniel cheated on and divorced her. At a second trial that began on December 11, 1991, she was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder and later sentenced to 32 years to life in prison.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Betty Broderick", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 48 edits to this article on 2026-05-09, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• In popular culture
• Marriage breakdown
• Trials and imprisonment
• Death
• Trials
• Court cases

What changed that day

The article grew by 994 characters that day. The largest single addition was 323 characters to Marriage breakdown. See everything that changed on 2026-05-09 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.