List of FIFA World Cup hosts saw 28x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Nineteen countries have hosted the FIFA World Cup in the competition's twenty-three tournaments since the inaugural World Cup in 1930. FIFA at first awarded hosting to countries at meetings of its congress. The choice of location was controversial in the earliest tournaments, given the three-week boat journey between South America and Europe, the two centers of strength in football at the time.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "List of FIFA World Cup hosts", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 2 edits to this article on 2026-06-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• 2038 FIFA World Cup

What changed that day

The article lost 626 characters on balance that day. See everything that changed on 2026-06-11 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.