Wikipedia readers turned to Welles Crowther at 141x the usual rate

What this article is

Welles Remy Crowther was an American equities trader known for heroically stepping in to save as many as 18 lives during the September 11 attacks in New York City, during which he lost his own life in the collapse of the World Trade Center's South Tower. In 2006, Crowther was posthumously named an Honorary FDNY firefighter.

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

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 15 edits to this article on 2026-09-12, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Legacy
• September 11 attacks

What changed that day

The article lost 9 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 449 characters. 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.