RSA numbers is drawing 601x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

In mathematics, the RSA numbers are a set of large semiprimes that were part of the RSA Factoring Challenge. The challenge was to find the prime factors of each number. It was created by RSA Laboratories in March 1991 to encourage research into computational number theory and the practical difficulty of factoring large integers. The challenge was ended in 2007.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 5 edits to this article on 2026-09-03, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• RSA-155
• RSA-260

What changed that day

The article grew by 568 characters that day. The largest single addition was 490 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-09-03 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.