Wikipedia readers turned to Equal Earth projection at 884x the usual rate

What this article is

The Equal Earth map projection is an equal-area pseudocylindrical global map projection invented by Bojan Šavrič, Bernhard Jenny, and Tom Patterson in 2018. It is inspired by the widely used Robinson projection, but unlike the Robinson projection, it retains the relative size of areas, and the projection equations are designed to be simple to implement and fast to evaluate.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 42 edits to this article on 2026-09-05, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Features and purpose
• 'Correct The Map' campaign
• United Nations adoption
• Alternatives
• Formulation
• Use

What changed that day

The article grew by 11,906 characters that day. The largest single addition was 9,350 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-09-05 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.