Makemake saw 101x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Makemake is a dwarf planet orbiting the Sun in the Kuiper belt, a disc of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the fourth largest dwarf planet and trans-Neptunian object in the Solar System, having a diameter 60% that of Pluto. It was discovered on March 31, 2005, by American astronomers Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz at Palomar Observatory. As one of the largest objects found by this team, the discovery of Makemake contributed to the reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 20 edits to this article on 2026-06-15, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Name and symbol
• Discovery
• Exploration

What changed that day

The article grew by 1,314 characters that day. The largest single addition was 1,585 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-06-15 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.