Todd Beamer saw 195x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Todd Morgan Beamer was an American passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which was hijacked and crashed as part of the September 11 attacks in 2001. He, along with Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, and several other passengers and crew including CeeCee Lyles attempted to regain control of the aircraft from the hijackers. During the struggle, the hijackers crashed the Boeing 757 into a field in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board, but preventing them from reaching their intended target, presumably the U.S. Capitol or the White House.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Todd Beamer", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

What changed that day

The article lost 9 characters on balance that day. See everything that changed on 2026-09-12 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.