Wikipedia readers turned to Tammy Faye Messner at 147x the usual rate

What this article is

Tamara Faye Messner was an American evangelist. She co-founded the televangelist program The PTL Club with her then-husband Jim Bakker in 1974. They had hosted a puppet-show in local television programming, in the early 1960s; Messner also had a career as a recording artist. In 1978, she and Bakker built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Tammy Faye Messner", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 13 edits to this article on 2026-10-06, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• 1974–1987: The PTL Club
• Death
• In popular culture

What changed that day

The article grew by 537 characters that day. The largest single addition was 126 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-10-06 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.