Khalid Sheikh Mohammed saw 41x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani militant, and the former head of propaganda for al-Qaeda. As of 2026, he is held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp under terrorism-related charges. He was named as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks" in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 3 edits to this article on 2026-09-12, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Early life and education
• Trial for role in the 11 September attacks

What changed that day

The article grew by 50 characters that day. The largest single addition was 38 characters to Early life and education. See everything that changed on 2026-09-12 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.