Matthew Stafford saw 27x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

John Matthew Stafford is an American professional football quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football for the Georgia Bulldogs, receiving first-team All-American honors in 2008, and was selected first overall by the Detroit Lions in the 2009 NFL draft. Ranking in the top 10 of all time in pass attempts, pass completions, passing yards, and passing touchdowns, Stafford is currently sixth all time in passing yards per game and the fastest player in NFL history to have reached 40,000 career passing yards.

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

What changed that day

The article lost 25 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 134 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-09-28 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.