The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (December 6 to 12, 2015)

← Last week's report – Next week's report →

Summary: By now, I hope most of our viewers understand that this list is not a perfect reflection of raw data. Wikipedia is subject to spamming, botnets and even legitimate calibration checks that riddle the list with non-human views. Ever since this list began, we've had to use our own judgement and what evidence we had to determine which cases are real and which are not, and in the past, such decisions could be agonizing. Since the inclusion of mobile views, however, what used to be a torturous experience has become fairly routine. No more checking viewing patterns; no more furious data mining of Google hits; no more frantic attempts to wrangle Reddit's lousy search engine. Just check the mobile percentage, and if it's too low or too high, drop it. But this week, it seems the Internet has decided it wants to screw with us in a number of ways. Not only was this one of the most spammed lists ever, with 17 removals, but our #1, Donald Trump, was tenth on the raw list. Even more frustratingly, several articles, while suspicious, were just within our criteria for inclusion, leading to a return to the familiar spasms of self-doubt.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of December 6 to 12, 2015, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Donald Trump	914,072	The Donald has not graced this list with his august orangutannedness since September, but if there's one thing we've learned about him in the last few months, it's that he will find his way back into the spotlight no matter what. And "What?" indeed, for this week his comments crossed so many lines that scandalized media pundits have actually dusted off that hoary descriptor "fascist" in response, just to see if it fits. And whether it does or not, it says something about Trump's campaign that numerous mainstream news articles have devoted themselves to delicately parsing this onetime hate buzzword of the left to gauge its appropriateness for use in a 21st-century election. None of this, it must be said, has hurt Donald in the polls, which now show him neck and neck with every one of his competitors combined.
2	Star Wars: The Force Awakens	795,288	The final build-up has begun. The much anticipated film rolls out in parts of Europe on December 16, the U.K. on December 17, and North America on December 18.
3	Frank Sinatra	727,017	"Old Blue Eyes"'s 100th birthday was celebrated around the world on December 12, which shows just how broadly his appeal cut across generations, despite him also being very much of his time- with his crystalline voice, impeccable dress sense and icy persona, he presented the perfect embodiment of the era of James Bond and Mad Men.
4	Star Wars	693,512	See #2
5	Krampus	638,373	As Yuletide falls in the German-speaking regions of the Alps, children are told not only of jolly Saint Nick with his sack of toys; they are also told of Krampus, whose sack is empty, waiting to be filled with naughty children who will then be carried to his lair. He isn't the only "anti-Santa" out there; the Dutch have Zwarte Piet, and the Haitians have Tonton Macoute, but Krampus's demonic appearance caught the eye of America last year, where he became a leering antidote to the oversaturation of manufactured Christmas cheer, and this year, it seems he's back, no doubt aided by a popular movie, which has so far nearly doubled its $15 million budget at the box office.
6	Attack on Pearl Harbor	627,670	Numbers have nearly doubled since FDR's "day that will live in infamy" appeared on last year's anniversary, probably aided by this year being the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
7	Dolly Parton	601,836	The beloved country music singer's TV biopic, Coat of Many Colors, was seen by 12.8 million viewers when it aired on the US network NBC on December 10.
8	Deaths in 2015	601,665	The viewing figures for this article have been remarkably constant; fluctuating week to week between 475 and 575 thousand on average, apparently heedless of who actually died.
9	Scott Weiland	599,321	The former lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots was found dead on his tour bus in Minnesota on December 3, likely the result of a drug overdose. Weiland was an unabashed rock star-type who came out of a 1990s grunge-era that was very ambivalent about 70s rock glamour. Sadly, Weiland's long history of drug use made his death not terribly shocking to many.
10	Jessica Jones	571,640	After a second 50% drop in two weeks, it seems Marvel Studios' latest Netflix offering is emulating its predecessor, Daredevil, in rapidly tumbling from the top of this list to relegation. This is likely due to Netflix's releasing the entire series in one go, which allows fans to binge-watch it in mere hours, leading to a burst of feverish discussion followed by a rapid decline in interest.
11	Jessica Jones (TV series)	544,348	See above.
12	Hanukkah	523,851	The 8-day Hebrew Festival of Lights, commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem during the Maccabean Revolt against the Persian Seleucid Empire in 200 BC, began on December 6 this year.
13	Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant	504,877	In the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks and the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, public fear of this repellent non-state has spiked, leading many to support some rather questionable proposed solutions, such as banning all Muslims from entering the United States.
14	Hate Story 3	498,752	Bollywood is notorious for chasteness, which makes this "erotic thriller" an interesting prospect. Starring Zarine Khan (pictured), the film has proven a box office hit, earning Rs 500 million ($7.5 million) in its first two weeks of release.
15	Adele	412,116	"Hello, it's Adele, if you're wondering, after eight weeks yes I'm still here." And will no doubt stay in the Top 25 for a bit longer.
16	Krampus (film)	408,136	See #5.
17	Conor McGregor	404,319	On December 12, at UFC 194, the Irish MMA star became the UFC Featherweight Champion after knocking out José Aldo in 13 seconds, capping a pretty good last few weeks for his country in combat sports.
18	John Anglin	402,102	John and Clarence Anglin, brothers and fellow inmates who took part in the June 1962 Alcatraz escape, were officially reported to have drowned; however, their mother received an anonymous gift of flowers every Mother's Day until she died, as learned in a Reddit thread this week.
19	2015 San Bernardino shooting	400,590	Another mass shooting in the United States, which occurred on December 2, leaving 14 dead and 21 injured. On December 6, US President Barack Obama declared it an act of Islamic terrorism.
20	Joy (film)	390,142	The yet-to-be-released film reunites Jennifer Lawrence (pictured), with her director and costars from The Silver Linings Playbook to tell the story of Joy Mangano, the inventor of the Miracle Mop and Huggable Hangars. The film had its premiere in New York City on December 13 and will be released nationwide on Christmas Day.
21	The Ultimate Fighter: Team McGregor vs. Team Faber	388,029	The fortuitously timed finale of this UFC-themed reality TV show aired on December 9.
22	UFC 194	384,972	See #17.
23	École Polytechnique massacre	382,658	26 years ago this week, a man walked into an engineering class at the École Polytechnique in Montréal wielding a semi-automatic carbine, ordered the men to leave, and then shot the female students one by one, claiming he was fighting feminism. Despite a suspiciously low mobile count, this article does have reason to be on this list; not only as an anniversary but in light of current events.
24	X-Men: Apocalypse	376,077	Bryan Singer's followup to the magahit X-Men: Days of Future Past, which features the screen début of the X-Verse's Big Bad, Apocalypse, had its trailer released this week.
25	Scream Queens (2015 TV series)	358,504	Ryan Murphy's comedic companion piece to American Horror Story had its season finale on December 8.

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 also 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. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the talk page if you wish.

Specific exclusions this week:

Google and Facebook, while welcome visitors to this list in the past, have in the last two weeks seen a near-100 percent increase in their mobile views, without any corresponding increase in their non-mobile views. Such an increase defies any natural explanation. If this continues, then we may finally have to bid them goodbye, and permanently shift them here, much as it would pain us to do so.

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