Ganesh Chaturthi saw 84x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Ganesh Chaturthi, also known as Vinayaka Chaturthi, Vinayaka Chavithi, or Vinayagar Chaturthi, is a Hindu festival celebrating the arrival of the Hindu deity Ganesha to the south of India to meet his brother Karthikeya. The festival is marked with the installation of Ganesha's murtis, privately in homes and publicly on elaborate pandals. Observances include chanting of Vedic hymns and Hindu texts, such as prayers and vrata (fasting). Offerings and prasada from the daily prayers, which are distributed from the pandal to the community, include sweets such as modak, as it is believed to be a favourite of Ganesha. The festival ends on the tenth day after its start, when the murti is carried in a public procession with music and group chanting, and then immersed in a nearby body of water such as a river or sea, called visarjana on the day of Ananta Chaturdashi. In Mumbai alone, around 150,000 murtis are immersed annually. It is a state festival of Indian state Maharashtra.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 10 edits to this article on 2026-09-14, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Environmental impact
• At prominent temples

What changed that day

The article grew by 382 characters that day. The largest single addition was 631 characters to At prominent temples. See everything that changed on 2026-09-14 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.