John Worboys saw 494x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

John Derek Radford is a British convicted serial sex offender, known as the Black Cab Rapist. Worboys was convicted in 2009 for attacks on 12 women, committed between 2007 and 2008. In 2019, he was convicted for attacks on four more women, the earliest of which took place in 2000. Police say he may have had more than 100 victims.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 3 edits to this article on 2026-05-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• 5 February

What changed that day

The article lost 24 characters on balance that day. See everything that changed on 2026-05-11 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.