Iron lung saw 61x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

An iron lung is a type of negative pressure ventilator, a mechanical respirator which encloses most of a person's body and varies the air pressure in the enclosed space to stimulate breathing. It assists breathing when muscle control is lost, or the work of breathing exceeds the person's ability. Need for this treatment may result from diseases including polio and botulism and certain poisons.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 4 edits to this article on 2026-07-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Continued use
• Outcomes

What changed that day

The article lost 91 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 8 characters to Continued use. See everything that changed on 2026-07-11 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.