Wikipedia readers turned to Ian Charleson at 40x the usual rate

What this article is

Ian Charleson was a Scottish stage and screen actor. He is best known internationally for his starring role as Olympic athlete and missionary Eric Liddell in the Oscar-winning 1981 film Chariots of Fire. He is also well known for his portrayal of Rev. Charlie Andrews in the 1982 Oscar-winning film Gandhi.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 3 edits to this article on 2026-10-06, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Death

What changed that day

The article lost 18 characters on balance that day. See everything that changed on 2026-10-06 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.