The disappearance of the Queen of the United Kingdom on September 8, 2022 generated extraordinary traffic on Wikipedia, as with every major event. The death of Elizabeth II tripled the number of requests.
If you needed a thermometer to gauge public interest in a subject, the best candidate for it might well be Wikipedia. Because the encyclopedia has many tools to monitor its traffic and the attendance of its various pages. With the death of the Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, the site’s statistics have literally gone into overdrive.
Since September 8, 2022, the date of the death of the British sovereign, the graphs shared by several members of the Wikipedia community show a jump in search volume. This is certainly not surprising: major news events have long led to bursts of activity. The disappearance of Michael Jackson in 2009 had thus shaken the site.
At the time, the death of the singer had even crashed Wikipedia punctually, has recalled Pierre-Yves Beaudouin, administrator of the Wikimedia France association, on September 8. This was, it seems, because of an article caching issue. More than ten years later, the encyclopedia has not wavered despite an event of an equivalent magnitude.
23.7 million queries per minute at peak on Wikipedia
However, the influx of connections was massive at the end of the afternoon. This is what we see in a dashboard of the Wikimedia association, showing the volume of requests on all the language versions of the site. They tripled in the evening, noted the same day Amir Sarabadani, another Wikipedian, in a message posted on Twitter.
All the other indicators are of the same order: the news of Queen Elizabeth’s death more than doubled the total traffic per second for the whole of Wikipedia (180 million pages in more than 300 languages) ยป, has reported Dario Taraborelli, another Wikipedian. There was a peak at 400,000 requests per second, compared to less than 150,000 during the same period, a week before.
In other words, Wikipedia received hundreds of millions of requests the same day for long minutes, at the height of the event. A peak was even reached at 23.7 million requests/minute, just before 6 p.m. Things didn’t get back to normal until about four hours later. Typically, the volume of requests does not exceed 10 million/minute.
Elizabeth II, one of the most visited Wikipedia pages
By focusing on the French version of Wikipedia, it is obviously the British crown that has attracted the most attention. The most consulted pages in the last 24 hours are, of course, those devoted to Elizabeth II, her successor (the Charles of Wales page has since become Charles III) and several key places and figures of royalty .
Apart from the cookie page, whose first place and received volume are quite enigmatic, almost all of the top of the ranking is occupied by the affairs and history of the British crown. There are oddities, but they can be explained: Liz Truss is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Louis XIV is one of the sovereigns with the longest reign, exceeding Elizabeth II by two years.
Behind the scenes too, the death of Elizabeth II generated a very strong activity. In addition to the millions of visits to the pages concerning the sovereign, the editions were very intense. On its dedicated page alone, there have been more than 160 modifications since the beginning of the afternoon of September 8 and the announcement of health concerns. And, of course, some editing conflicts.
