Ebola saw 78x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Ebola, also known as Ebola virus disease (EVD) and Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF), is a zoonotic viral hemorrhagic fever in humans and other primates, caused by four of the six known ebolaviruses. Symptoms typically start anywhere between two days and three weeks after infection. The first symptoms are usually fever, sore throat, muscle pain, and headaches. These are usually followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, hepatic and renal dysfunction, at which point some people begin to bleed both internally and externally. Outbreaks of the disease have had a mortality rate of between 25 and 90%, averaging out at approximately 50%. The viral species involved and timing of treatment play a critical role in its prognosis. Death is often due to shock from fluid loss, and typically occurs between 6 and 16 days after the first symptoms appear.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 5 edits to this article on 2026-05-19, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Infection control
• Prognosis

What changed that day

The article grew by 44 characters that day. The largest single addition was 45 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-05-19 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.