Wikipedia readers turned to Mel Brooks at 20x the usual rate

What this article is

Melvin James Brooks is an American actor, comedian, film director, songwriter and playwright. With a career spanning seven decades, he is known for a variety of successful farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of the few people to win the EGOT. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016 and a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 16 edits to this article on 2026-06-28, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• 2001–present
• 1980–2001: Established career

What changed that day

The article grew by 16,009 characters that day. The largest single addition was 15,934 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-06-28 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.