Wikipedia readers turned to Spider-Man in film at 16x the usual rate

What this article is

Spider-Man, a superhero character created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko for American comic books published by Marvel Comics, has appeared in virtually every form of media, including film since the 1970s. CBS's television film pilot for the program The Amazing Spider-Man in 1977 represents the first Spider-Man film adaptation. Marvel Comics spent the 1980s pursuing plans for a feature film, in a tumultuous development involving multiple directors, writers, and financiers. After protracted litigation over the Spider-Man copyrights, Sony Pictures and its subsidiary Columbia obtained the film rights for $7 million from Marvel in 1999.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Spider-Man in film", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 3 edits to this article on 2026-08-02, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Box office

What changed that day

The article grew by 341 characters that day. The largest single addition was 343 characters to Box office. See everything that changed on 2026-08-02 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.