Murder of Kristin Smart is drawing 110x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

Kristin Denise Smart was a 19-year-old American woman murdered by Paul Flores at the end of her first year on the campus of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Murder of Kristin Smart", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 2 edits to this article on 2026-05-09, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Official investigation

What changed that day

The article lost 8 characters on balance that day. See everything that changed on 2026-05-09 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.