Wikipedia readers turned to Margaret Keane at 238x the usual rate

What this article is

Margaret D. H. Keane was an American artist known for her paintings of subjects with big eyes. She mainly painted women, children, or animals in oil or mixed media. The work achieved commercial success through inexpensive reproductions on prints, plates, and cups. The artwork was originally attributed to Keane's then-husband, Walter Keane. Soon after their divorce in the 1960s, Margaret claimed credit, which was established after a courtroom "paint-off" in Hawaii, in which Walter refused to participate.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 2 edits to this article on 2026-07-25, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Career after Walter Keane
• Media portrayals

What changed that day

The article grew by 1 characters that day. The largest single addition was 1 characters to Media portrayals. See everything that changed on 2026-07-25 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.