September 11 attacks saw 55x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

The September 11 attacks, colloquially known as 9/11, were a coordinated series of suicide attacks perpetrated by the Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. A total of 19 hijackers commandeered four commercial passenger airliners. The first two planes were flown into each of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City, while the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in a rural field in Pennsylvania during a passenger revolt.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "September 11 attacks", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 66 edits to this article on 2026-09-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Crashes
• Motives
• Attacks
• Immediate response
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al-Qaeda members
• Memorials

What changed that day

The article grew by 2,431 characters that day. The largest single addition was 1,653 characters to Military operations. See everything that changed on 2026-09-11 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.