Esther Rantzen saw 336x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Dame Esther Louise Rantzen was an English journalist and television presenter who presented the BBC television series That's Life! for 21 years, from 1973 until 1994. She worked with various charitable causes and founded the charities Childline, a helpline for children, which she set up in 1986, and The Silver Line, designed to combat loneliness in older people's lives, which she set up in November 2012.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 7 edits to this article on 2026-10-03, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Relationship with Jimmy Savile

What changed that day

The article grew by 400 characters that day. The largest single addition was 295 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-10-03 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.