The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (April 24 to 30, 2016)

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Summary: I would never pride myself on being unusual; I think it can be safely stated however that I and my fellow native Wikipedians share few priorities with the general public. I have already mentioned in my previous post that I do not get spectator sport, and our viewers' unending obsession with the non-sport of professional wrestling remains an eternal source of mystification. But to those you could add any number of public obsessions completely outside my proverbial wheelhouse. Bikini bodies. Probiotic yoghurt. Singers and/or dancers below US drinking age. Pictures of genitalia posted on social media. Inexplicably popular Armenian-American families. But on the summit of that pile of mental erased files must perch the private lives of famous people. As an intensely private person myself, I do not believe that the lives of those who happen to attain a certain level of public regard are in the public domain, any more than their bodies are. So it always shocks me when a celebrity (like, say, Beyoncé) uses the travails of her private life as a means of viral marketing, as appears to have happened in the release of her latest album Lemonade. It is interesting to note that, while she supposedly used her album to castigate her husband Jay-Z for cheating on her, she still released it exclusively on his download service, Tidal.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of April 24 to 30, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from WMF's TopViews, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Prince (musician)	3,994,635	Down nearly 80% in views from last week, when his death managed to garner a staggering 13 million views in just three days, the Purple One still managed to retain the top spot. It is sobering to realise that we are now seeing that generation of popular musicians pass away, in many cases before those in the previous generation, which was itself no stranger to tragic and premature death. One wonders if in 30 years, a centenarian Bob Dylan or Keith Richards will be the last one standing.
2	Claude Shannon	1,536,831	The World War II cryptographer widely regarded as the father of information theory and the digital circuit got a Google Doodle to celebrate his 100th birthday on April 30th.
3	Captain America: Civil War	1,384,304	With the relative disappointment of Dawn of Justice, all eyes are turning to the next big comic blockbuster released this year which, despite the Captain America headline, is being marketed as another Avengers movie (with Spider-Man!). Whether this will see it over the $1 billion hurdle remains to be seen, but omens are good, with it having already earned $84 million internationally ahead of its US première next week. When that hits, expect view numbers to skyrocket.
4	Hertha Marks Ayrton	1,314,001	The Hughes Medal-winning physicist and inventor, who investigated the mathematics behind electric arcs and sand ripples, and invented a fan for clearing trenches of poisoned gas, got a Google Doodle on her 162nd birthday on 28 April.
5	Game of Thrones (season 6)	1,097,105	The latest season of this eternally popular TV series premiered on HBO on 24 April. There was a time when such an event would have crushed this list. But the movie world has reclaimed its place in the public's heart from TV and music in the last few years, and so now it is just one event among many.
6	Hillsborough disaster	1,094,036	Topics of purely British interest almost never make the Top 25, let alone the Top 10, so when they do, you know they're significant. On the 15 April 1989, during a 1988–89 FA Cup semi-final match at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, a human crush caused the deaths of 96 people; the highest recorded toll in the history of British sport. More than the toll itself however, what has kept memories of the event alive for many was the reaction of the conservative press, many of which shifted the blame from the police to the fans themselves, despite an inquiry stating that the main cause of the disaster had been failure of police control and bad stadium design. On 26 April 2016, an inquest stated that the 96 victims had been unlawfully killed due to gross negligence on the part of the police, raising the possibility of new prosecutions.
7	Lemonade (Beyoncé album)	1,014,970	The latest album from Beyoncé, released exclusively on her husband Jay-Z's streaming service, Tidal, has been something of a marketing masterstroke- drawing mainstream attention via an accompanying 60-minute film release on HBO (ala Michael Jackson's Thriller) but also triggering a viral storm with an insinuation that her husband had cheated on her with "a Becky with good hair" (supposed code for a white woman).
8	Rachel Roy	970,266	The Indian American fashion designer and ex-wife of Jay-Z partner Damon Dash, who had long been suspected of being more than friends with the married-to-Beyoncé Jay-Z, made what can only be described as a catastrophically ill-judged post on Instagram in the wake of Beyoncé's cryptic "Becky with the good hair" lyric: "Good hair don’t care, but we will take good lighting, for selfies, or self truths, always. live in the light #nodramaqueens." You can imagine what happened next. Beyoncé's fans, known as the Beyhive, swarmed onto Roy's online identity, vandalising her Wikipedia page and flooding her Instagram with the usual poorly-spelled death threats. Casualties of this stinging attack included Roy's 11-year-old daughter, who received comments on social media like “Yo mom needs to drink bleach,” and even celebrity chef Rachael Ray, who has absolutely nothing in common with Roy save eight letters of her name.
9	Game of Thrones	827,670	See #5.
10	Beyoncé	781,212	It is a mark of the uncontrollable force the Madonna of her generation unleashed when she included coded references to her husband's infidelity in her latest album that people are less interested in her than they are in the woman they decided she was referring to.
11	Deaths in 2016	718,585	The annual list of deaths, always a fairly consistent visitor to this list, suddenly saw its average views jump after the death of David Bowie and has seen another jump after the death of Prince.
12	Donald Trump	685,354	With his delegate count reaching 77% of outright victory, and polls all over the place in the large, winner-take-all state of Indiana (due to vote on May 3), Republicans are gradually moving from the idea of forcing Trump to a brokered convention and simply accepting him as their nominee.
13	2016 NFL draft	678,004	America's annual débutante ball for jocks was held this week, with top pick going to UC Berkeley's Jared Goff.
14	The Jungle Book (2016 film)	626,266	This American film based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, previously adapted to screen in a 1967 animated film, has made over $600 million worldwide since it premiered on April 4. With rapturous reviews (the film currently has a 94% RT rating), the film looks to remain in the public consciousness for some time. Despite being described as a "live-action reboot", the film is really more of a CGI cartoon, with nearly everything onscreen except the lead child actor Neel Sethi composed of computer graphics.
15	Chernobyl disaster	577,757	"Kiev, capital of the Ukraine," said Michael Palin in his 1991 documentary Pole to Pole, "is the third-largest city in the Soviet Union. If the wind had been blowing from the south on the 26th of April 1986, it would now be dead." Whatever you think you know of the worst ever nuclear disaster, which befell our planet thirty years ago this week, the reality was probably worse, and the potential realities far worse even than that. It truly was a nightmare, made worse by the instinctive paranoia and secrecy of the Soviet state, who initially refused to inform Europe of the contamination it had unleashed on their continent.
16	Chyna	501,640	The lead sentence of our article on Chyna says she "was an American professional wrestler, actress, glamour model, bodybuilder, English teacher and pornographic film actress." She rose to fame on the wrestling part, though. She was found dead in her California home on April 20, at the age of 46.
17	List of Game of Thrones episodes	466,375	See #5.
18	Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice	444,357	By any measure, except perhaps, its own, Warner Bros's attempt to counter the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a success. It has crossed the $800 million mark worldwide, which means that, even given its gargantuan production and marketing budget, it is now in profit, and is likely to generate a tidy sum once the ancillaries are counted. And yet, the mood over at DC/Warner is tense; with its rapidly declining earnings, it is unlikely to enter the "$1 billion club" currently occupied by Marvel's two Avengers films, and has already been outgrossed by Zootopia, released just three weeks earlier. How this will portend for the planned DC Extended Universe is uncertain. All eyes are now on Suicide Squad.
19	Views From the 6	441,329	The latest album from rapper Drake (pictured) was released on 29 April. It's rare for a redirect to outperform the actual article title on this list, but there does seem to be some confusion in that regard. The actual article "Views (album)" just missed the Top 25.
20	UFC 197	433,357	The mixed martial arts event was held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on 23 April, with the headline fight won by Jon Jones (pictured).
21	Purple Rain (film)	414,483	A musical rock drama film from 1984 that starred Prince.
22	Fan (film)	396,866	This Bollywood hybrid of The Fan and Single White Female, in which a Bollywood star and an obsessed lookalike (both played by Shah Rukh Khan (pictured)) gradually become entangled in a game of revenge, was made on a relatively hefty budget of ₹850 million ($13 million) and has struggled to cross the psychologically significant ₹1 billion mark by its second week. Analysts blame its underperformance on the awkward placing of a superstar like Khan in a more "arty" production, without the usual Bollywood crowd-pleasers, like musical numbers.
23	List of Bollywood films of 2016	384,263	The list of Bollywood films for a given year is not always on this list, but always present at the end of the year.
24	Drake (rapper)	374,048	See #19.
25	Gloria Vanderbilt	373,994	A documentary on HBO about the American heiress and mother of television journalist Anderson Cooper titled Nothing Left Unsaid debuted on 9 April. That thumbnail is a photo of Vanderbilt at age 24 in 1958, from the Carl Van Vechten collection at the Library of Congress. In finding thumbnails for this chart, it is always intriguing to the see the spottiness of our photographic collection. It is nice when we have post-1923 public domain photographs, though none of the ones of Vanderbilt date past the 1950s. In my head, Gloria Vanderbilt is always wearing her trademark jeans, but we don't have any photographs of that.

Exclusions

This list excludes the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (~2% or less) or almost all mobile views (~95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Since WP:5000 and WMF Topviews use different exclusion algorithms, articles that appear in one but not the other can also safely be excluded as false. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the talk page if you wish.

Note: If you came here from the Signpost article, please take any discussion of exclusions to this article's talk page.