Wikipedia readers turned to Trial of Alex Murdaugh at 94x the usual rate

What this article is

State of South Carolina v. Richard Alexander Murdaugh was the trial of former American lawyer Alex Murdaugh for the murders of his wife, Maggie, and their 22-year-old son, Paul, on June 7, 2021. The trial in the fourteenth circuit of the South Carolina Circuit Court began on January 25, 2023, and ended on March 2 with a guilty verdict on all four counts. Murdaugh was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. On May 13, 2026 the State Supreme Court overturned the convictions against Murdaugh, citing jury interference by court clerk Rebecca Hill. Prosecutors intend to retry the case.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Trial of Alex Murdaugh", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 27 edits to this article on 2026-05-13, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Motion for new trial

What changed that day

The article grew by 391 characters that day. The largest single addition was 594 characters. See everything that changed on 2026-05-13 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.