Monica Witt saw 336x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Monica Elfriede Witt is a former defense contractor and intelligence Technical Sergeant of the United States Air Force who defected to Iran in 2013 and is currently a top FBI fugitive wanted for a 2018 indictment of espionage against the United States. From 2003 and 2008, her work involved counterintelligence assignments that took her to the Middle East. United States assistant attorney general John Demers charged Witt in 2018 and claims she likely provided Iran with the existence of a “highly classified intelligence collection program” and the identity of a US intelligence officer, “thereby risking the life of this individual.”

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

What changed that day

The article lost 9 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 28 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-05-15 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.