WP:TOP25

Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (December 8 to 14, 2013)

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

Summary: As regular readers of this article may have gleaned by now, I'm something of a cynic; I have little to no faith in humanity, a position not helped by the topics making frequent visitations to this list. Despite Wikipedia offering all the knowledge of humanity to the world (at varying levels of accuracy), most people seem to want to use it as either to keep track of celebrity scandals, as a free TV listings guide or, rather oddly, a noticeboard for the deaths of famous people. Last week, Paul Walker, an action star who outside of his signature Fast and Furious franchise had not had a major hit, and Nelson Mandela, a global hero and inspiration to millions of people, both died, one in a car crash, the other peacefully in his sleep. When Walker's death generated 7.4 million hits over Mandela's 4.2, I initially concluded that the public had been drawn to the ghoulish nature of Walker's demise over the far more historically significant, if uneventful, passing of Mandela. And yet... Mandela's death was relatively late in the week; Walker's had occurred right at the start. Maybe the stats were lying; after all, day-to-day, Mandela's death was generating twice the hits of Walker's. So I waited a week, and, well, Walker's death still generated more hits in its first week than Mandela's did. In its first ten days. So, OK. Apparently people are far more attached to the Fast and Furious series than I ever knew. In other news, an animated Google Doodle generated another record-breaking hit count for the year, though the count for the list overall was lower than for that of the previous holder.

For the week of December 8 to 14, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages* were:

Rank	Last	Wks	Article	Class	Views	Notes
1	-	-	Grace Hopper		9,412,775	Animated Google Doodles always bring in the numbers, but this record-breaking surge is not something you'd expect to see unless India's involved. Still, a sizeable portion of Wikipedia's readership are, let's face it, nerds, and it's hard to imagine a more nerd-friendly topic than computer programming. And for a computer programmer, Grace Hopper was pretty badass, not only for being a woman in a still-male-dominated field, but a US Navy Rear Admiral to boot. She graduated first in her Naval class, despite being 15 pounds under stipulated minimum weight, and also popularised the word "debugging" to describe fixing computer glitches. And speaking of words, one wonders how much more civil your average YouTube comments section would be if there were more people like her in the computer industry today.
2	2	6	Nelson Mandela		2,549,220	The 95-year-old father of the new South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize winner and global inspiration finally succumbed to his long illness on December 5, triggering tributes from around the world.
3	-	-	Bonnie and Clyde		1,338,252	The killing and robbing duo got a spike of interest this week when The History Channel launched a cross-channel event to promote a docudrama about them. Despite the venue, this film is not being hailed for historical accuracy; according to The Guardian's Erin McGann, "if you're a fan of the 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, stay away. And if you have even a passing familiarity with the real-life story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker … stay far, far away."
4	1	2	Paul Walker		526,200	The tragic death on the road of this Hollywood star remains a major talking point.
5	14	12	United States		484,089	The 3rd most popular Wikipedia article between 2010 and 2012, and even when not on the list, a perpetual bubble-under-er. Not really surprising that the country with by far the most English speakers would be the most popular on the English Wikipedia.
6	10	49	Facebook		477,654	A perennially popular article
7	7	2	Apartheid in South Africa		413,876	The death of Nelson Mandela led to renewed attention for the atrocious system he suffered to end.
8	20	2	Frozen (2013 film)		390,297	Disney's de facto sequel to Tangled outperformed its predecessor in its first two weeks, and has now grossed over $264 million worldwide.
9	12	58	Deaths in 2013	List	388,959	The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article.
10	9	5	Bitcoin		354,188	The oddball digital currency that is mostly beloved of radical libertarians is back in the news this week. Bankers have (prematurely?) suggested it may prove a legitimate competitor to real money, even though many argue they are best described as a store of value rather than a functional currency. An attempt to declare "Bitcoin Black Friday" to try and get people to actually spend the frigging things instead of hoarding them (Except that, from one point of view, hoarding them is exactly the right thing to do if their value continues to skyrocket as it has done) led to the purchase of a great deal of gold, swapping one store of value another.
11	19	2	Christmas		337,414	Expect this to reach the upper branches of the list by next week.
12	22	12	Lorde		333,693	The just-turned 17-year-old singer-songwriter from New Zealand released her modestly titled debut album, Pure Heroine, on 27 September.
13	-	-	Blue field entoptic phenomenon		325,601	This optical phenomenon, in which our white blood cells appear as flying sprites against a bright blue background such as the sky, became a topic of interest on Reddit this week.
14	21	30	List of Bollywood films of 2013	List	294,144	An established staple of the top 25.
15	-	10	Arrow (TV series)		286,401	The second season of this superhero TV series began on 9 October
16	-	-	Arvind Kejriwal		285,852	India faces a general election next year, and the choices are not pleasant. The economy is slowing while unemployment is rising. The ruling Congress Party is widely regarded as ineffectual and nepotistic. The populist opposition leader, Narendra Modi, has an excellent economic record as governor of the state of Gujarat but is also a staunch Hindu nationalist who stood back when a pogrom against Muslims in his state claimed over 1000 lives in 2002. Cue Arvind Kejriwal, a former member of the Indian Revenue Service whose newly formed Aam Aadmi Party won 28 seats in this month's Delhi Legislative Assembly election. The party is running on a populist, anti-corruption platform, but it remains to be seen whether it will have any traction outside of Delhi.
17	17	51	World War II		280,164	Another perennially popular article. (The 16th most popular article from 2010 to 2012, in fact, see Table 2 here.)
18	-	-	Helle Thorning-Schmidt		280,153	The current Prime Minister of Denmark, regarded by some as the world's most attractive head of state (at least until Victor Yanukovych lets Yulia Tymoshenko out of prison) became a topic of interest across the world when she, Barack Obama and David Cameron faced criticism for indulging in a collective selfie during Nelson Mandela's funeral.
19	-	43	YouTube		278,560	Another perennially popular article
20	19	2	RMS Titanic		277,917	The fake fourth funnel of the celebrated sunken ship was the subject of a Reddit thread this week.
21	-	8	India		277,233	The second-largest English-speaking population on Earth is a regular visitor to the top 25.
22	-	-	Asperger syndrome		273,714	The low-level form of autism became a topic of discussion when singer Susan Boyle was revealed to have been diagnosed with it this week.
23	-	-	Beyoncé Knowles		273,099	The most popular singer of the new millennium managed to knock the world for six when she released her latest album, Beyoncé, on iTunes this week without any prior announcement or promotion. Nonetheless, the album sold nearly half a million copies in less than a day.
24	18	2	Vin Diesel		272,591	Unsurprisingly, Paul Walker's frequent Fast & Furious costar got some media attention in the aftermath of his friend's death.
25	-	-	Macaulay Culkin		272,303	The former child star came back into the news this week after announcing the formation of his new band The Pizza Underground; a Velvet Underground tribute band who sing exclusively about pizza. No, this is not a joke.

Almosts:

Santa Claus (269,684 views); IPv6 (266,573 views); Jennifer Lawrence (260,798 views)

Exclusions:

This list excludes the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages, and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Please keep in mind that the explanations given for these articles' popularity are, fundamentally, guesses. Just I can't find a reason for an article to be included doesn't mean there isn't one; conversely, just because a plausible reason is found for a view spike, that doesn't mean it wasn't due to a bot.

There are a number of articles that reappear frequently in the top 25 for no determined reason, and have been excluded as likely being due to automated views. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the talk page if you wish.
- Lycos: the geriatric web portal seems to be back en vogue, for no apparent reason.
- A rather un-creative bot is spamming the list with Trivial Pursuit-esque topic headers: "Human Interest"; "Entertainment Culture"; "Hospitality Recreation"; "Health Medical Pharma" etc. (for some reason, always capitalised- also, whoever created this bot has apparently never heard of the slash).
- Java: My only guess is a bot searching for the programming language.
- Several articles related to global warming (including global warming) have been removed from this list; their continued high view counts are raising suspicions of artificial inflation. I'll believe that Climategate was #1 during a typhoon, but that it got more hits than Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving? No.
- XXX (film): this decade-old Vin Diesel movie frequently appears in the top 25; given the popularity of articles like XXX, XXXX and .xxx, it has been suggested that this may be due to people Googling "XXX film" and not getting exactly what they expected.
- Meat: another mysterious reappearance, most likely due to bots.

Specific exclusions for this week:
- System of a Down: the heavy metal band got a one-day spike on 12 December for no reason that I can locate.

Notes:

Number of views needed to reach Top 25 this week: 272,303. Last week: 308,039.

The revision of WP:5000 containing the data used to create this list.