Harambe is drawing 64x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

Harambe was a western lowland gorilla who lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. On May 28, 2016, a three-year-old boy visiting the zoo climbed under a fence into an outdoor gorilla enclosure where he was grabbed and violently dragged and thrown by Harambe. Fearing for the boy's life, a zoo worker shot and killed Harambe. The incident was recorded on video and received broad international coverage and commentary, including controversy over the choice to use lethal force. Several primatologists and conservationists wrote later that the zoo had no other choice under the circumstances, and that it highlighted the danger of zoo animals near humans and the need for better standards of care.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 9 edits to this article on 2026-05-28, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Cultural impact

What changed that day

The article grew by 770 characters that day. The largest single addition was 350 characters to Cultural impact. See everything that changed on 2026-05-28 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.