Martha Lillard is drawing 128x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

Martha Ann Lillard was an American polio survivor who, following Paul Alexander's death, became the last known person in the United States who still relied on an iron lung. She contracted polio in 1953, when she was five years old.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 3 edits to this article on 2026-05-27, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Life in the iron lung

What changed that day

The article lost 33 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 4 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-05-27 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.