World Trade Center (1973–2001) saw 47x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

The original World Trade Center (WTC) was a complex of seven buildings in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Built primarily between 1966 and 1975, it was dedicated on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed on September 11, 2001, after two hijacked planes were flown into the towers in a coordinated terrorist attack. The complex included the 110-story-tall Twin Towers, the tallest buildings in the world at the time of completion—with the original 1 World Trade Center at 1,368 feet (417 m), and 2 World Trade Center at 1,362 feet (415.1 m)—and the tallest twin skyscrapers in the world until the Petronas Towers opened in 1996. The other buildings in the complex were the Marriott World Trade Center (3 WTC), 4 WTC, 5 WTC, 6 WTC, and 7 WTC. The complex contained 13,400,000 square feet (1,240,000 m2) of office space and, prior to its completion, was projected to accommodate an estimated 130,000 people.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "World Trade Center (1973–2001)", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 8 edits to this article on 2026-09-11, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• New World Trade Center
• Destruction
• North and South Towers

What changed that day

The article grew by 452 characters that day. The largest single addition was 314 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.