Mount Rushmore saw 21x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a national memorial featuring a colossal sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills, about 2 mi (3 km) southwest of Keystone, South Dakota, United States. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, named it the Shrine of Democracy, and oversaw the execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son, Lincoln Borglum. The sculpture features 60-foot-tall (18 m) depictions of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, respectively chosen to represent the nation's foundation, expansion, development, and preservation. Mount Rushmore attracts more than two million visitors annually to the memorial park which covers 1,278 acres.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 6 edits to this article on 2026-07-04, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Concept, design and funding

What changed that day

The article grew by 108 characters that day. The largest single addition was 107 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-07-04 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.