Mike Farrell saw 146x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Michael Joseph Farrell Jr. is an American actor, best known for his role as Captain B.J. Hunnicutt on the television series M*A*S*H (1975–1983). In addition, Farrell was a producer of Patch Adams (1998) starring Robin Williams, and he starred in the television series Providence (1999–2002).

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 2 edits to this article on 2026-08-24, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Personal life
• Television

What changed that day

The article grew by 18 characters that day. The largest single addition was 18 characters to Television. See everything that changed on 2026-08-24 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.