Timeline for the day of the September 11 attacks is drawing 231x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

The September 11 attacks of 2001, in addition to being a unique act of terrorism, constituted a media event on a scale not seen since the advent of civilian global satellite links. Instant worldwide reaction and debate were made possible by round-the-clock television news organizations and by the internet. As a result, most of the events were known by a large portion of the world's population as they occurred.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 13 edits to this article on 2026-09-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• 9:00 a.m.
• Detailed timeline of events
• 7:00 p.m.
• 8:00 a.m.
• 8:03 a.m.

What changed that day

The article grew by 287 characters that day. The largest single addition was 1,437 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.