Hal Williams saw 418x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Halroy Candis Williams was an American actor, best known for his recurring roles as Officer Smith ("Smitty") on Sanford and Son (1972–1976), Harley Foster on The Waltons (1973–1980), and as family patriarch Lester Jenkins on the NBC sitcom 227 which originally aired from 1985 until 1990. His film credits include Private Benjamin (1980), Guess Who (2005), and Flight (2012).

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 52 edits to this article on 2026-07-16, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Death
• Career
• Early life
• Selected credits
• Television

What changed that day

The article grew by 3,510 characters that day. The largest single addition was 720 characters to Selected credits. See everything that changed on 2026-07-16 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.