Canada Day saw 167x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Canada Day is the national day of Canada. A federal statutory holiday, it celebrates the anniversary of Canadian Confederation which occurred on July 1, 1867, when the three separate colonies of the United Canadas, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick were united into a single dominion within the British Empire called Canada.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 9 edits to this article on 2026-07-01, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• History

What changed that day

The article grew by 12 characters that day. The largest single addition was 66 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-07-01 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.