The Falling Man saw 88x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

The Falling Man is a photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew of an unidentified man falling from the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks in New York City, United States. The unidentified man in the image was trapped on the upper floors of the North Tower, and it is unknown whether he fell while searching for safety or jumped to escape the fire and smoke. The photograph was taken at 9:41:15 A.M.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "The Falling Man", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 9 edits to this article on 2026-09-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Jonathan Briley
• Background

What changed that day

The article grew by 315 characters that day. The largest single addition was 290 characters. 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.