Iraq national football team is drawing 40x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

The Iraq national football team, nicknamed the Lions of Mesopotamia, represents Iraq in men's international football and is controlled by the Iraq Football Association (IFA), the governing body for football in Iraq. Iraq's usual home venue is the Basra International Stadium.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Iraq national football team", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 4 edits to this article on 2026-06-16, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Coaching staff

What changed that day

The article grew by 17 characters that day. The largest single addition was 17 characters to Coaching staff. See everything that changed on 2026-06-16 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.