The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (February 28 to March 5, 2016)

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

Summary: The Oscars always bring high traffic, but this year they coincided with the quadrennial appearance of "Super Tuesday" and "Super Saturday"; two lots of state primaries in the runup to the 2016 US presidential election. With Donald Trump being accused of bringing show business into politics, with his use of tactics from reality TV and pro wrestling, the collision of these two events is less jarring than it might have been.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of February 28 to March 5, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Notes
1	Donald Trump		8,238,809	With all due respect to Martin Niemöller: first, he said Mexicans were rapists, and they laughed because he was a reality TV star. Then he said Muslims should be marked and tagged, and they laughed because it was obviously a stunt. Then he said America should be closed to Muslims, and they laughed because no one could take him seriously. And then he won nine states in one week, and the laughter ceased, for there was no one left who saw the joke. With the Republican field apparently narrowing to a choice between Trump and Ted Cruz, a choice Republican Senator Lindsey Graham memorably compared to "being shot or poisoned", that low-profile cadre of patricians known as the Republican establishment have apparently realised at last that he has a realistic shot of becoming their party's nominee, whether they like it or not. And they don't. So little do they like it in fact, that they have frantically thrown their weight behind Marco Rubio, who has yet to win a single primary (he has won one caucus, for the record) and, despite being described as "moderate" is a card-carrying Tea Partier.
2	Leonardo DiCaprio		3,029,543	22 years after earning his first Oscar nomination for his astonishing performance as a mentally-challenged teen opposite Johnny Depp in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (seriously, if you haven't seen it, do it), Leonardo DiCaprio finally won what had to be the least surprising award of Oscar night. And all he had to do was push himself to his absolute physical and mental limit for months in 30-below temperatures. So, Johnny, if you're looking for that elusive Oscar, there's your path to it. Just sayin'.
3	88th Academy Awards		2,032,515	This year's Oscars were the third-lowest rated since they were first broadcast on television, though only the second-lowest rated in eight years. And that despite the added attention of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, ably dealt with by host Chris Rock (pictured) who had been selected months before it began. The reason for the decline had nothing to do with a boycott (black audiences, according to Nielsen, were down just 2%) and everything to do with an ever more online world that views live television as an anachronism and awards as meaningless bling when set against the wisdom of digitally aggregated crowds.
4	Spotlight (film)		1,453,105	The era of the grand Oscar sweep, when films like Lawrence of Arabia, Dances With Wolves, and, most recently, Slumdog Millionaire could cap a category-spanning flush with a Best Picture win, is well and truly over. These days the Best Picture winner is lucky to walk away with four, three, or, in this case, two wins; the lowest tally for a Best Picture winner since The Greatest Show On Earth in 1953. But while that film was critically reviled, its win widely seen as an insult to the then-frontrunner High Noon, in this case the Academy seem to have aimed above their usual middlebrow consensus and gone for quality. The film, about Boston Globe journalists uncovering evidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, was the most critically praised of all the Best Picture nominees, while the presumed frontrunner, The Revenant, was the most critically disliked, with a 76 on Metacritic and an 82% RT score vs 93 and 96% for Spotlight. Audiences took notice; the weekend after the Oscars saw this film's BO take jump 150%.
5	Room (2015 film)		1,427,944	To the surprise of absolutely no one, Brie Larson (pictured) took away her Best Actress Oscar for her performance as a captive woman forced to live for years in an isolated room.
6	The Revenant (2015 film)		1,327,799	Despite losing the Best Picture nod to Spotlight (see #4) Alejandro González Iñárritu's Western survival epic continues to be popular with both audiences and Wikipedia viewers. The film has earned almost $430 million worldwide as of March 6.
7	O. J. Simpson		1,327,799	The former football player and Leslie Nielsen costar has become a fixture of this list, thanks to the first season of American Crime Story, the true-crime spinoff of American Horror Story, which focuses on his controversial trial in which he was cleared of murder.
8	Brie Larson		1,090,311	see #5
9	Jodie Sweetin		873,452	This actress is among the cast members returning for Fuller House (see #14)
10	Kate Winslet		820,600	She didn't make good on her seventh (!) Oscar nomination this year, but the fact that she was there with Leo when he finally won only cemented in the minds of the public that the two Titanic stars were destined for one another, and that her previous two decades of marriage and child-rearing were just a trial separation while she worked out her issues. That and some ill-judged, on-camera tummy-rubbing on the part of Cate Blanchett led to (false) speculation that she may again be pregnant.
11	Leap year	N/A	794,501	You'd think, given that it only happens once every four years (and sometimes not even then) that Leap Day would be a holiday by now, but no; instead all we can do is commiserate with those poor sods born on said day, for whom the world has to pretend three years out of four that they were born on March 1.
12	Mad Max: Fury Road		720,639	Not since Star Wars won seven awards nearly forty years ago has a sci-fi action blockbuster had such an impact on the Oscars; in fact, in terms of total tally, this grungy 80s revival was the big winner of the night, with six in total.
13	Deadpool (film)		720,316	The Marvel Comics antihero film starring Ryan Reynolds (pictured) was released on February 12 to a stellar reception. Regarded as a risk by its makers 20th Century Fox, the film has earned nearly $675 million as of March 7.
14	Fuller House (TV Series)		718,491	This sequel series to the 1987-95 American sitcom Full House debuted on Netflix on February 26, 2016. Pictured is actress Candace Cameron Bure, one of the returning cast members. I hope historians of the future realize that the reason ridiculous TV shows could return after 20 years in 2016 was because of the changing ways we watch TV, with on-demand, niche-driven options of channels like Netflix meeting needs no one could believe existed. To go back one prior generation of silly TV, The Brady Bunch (1969-1974) milked all it could out of sequels and movies after its original run, but a complete sequel series after twenty years would not have been viable.
15	Keanu Reeves		714,901	As learned in a Reddit thread this week, in 2001, the popular actor's girlfriend, Jennifer Syme died in a car accident just 18 months after giving birth to their stillborn daughter.
16	Super Tuesday		702,547	The first big hurdle of the 2016 US Presidential election has been cleared, and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have come out on top, with seven states each. But Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz are still in the running, with four and three states, respectively.
17	O. J. Simpson murder case		564,696	See #7.
18	Melania Trump		696,659	With the prospect of her being America's next First Lady suddenly no longer idle speculation, the media, in the form of Fox News's Greta van Susteren, began to turn their eye to Donald Trump's third and current wife. In an interview with the news anchor, Melania claimed that she had never had a fight in her 10-year-marriage to her notoriously pugnacious husband, leading to much scepticism among the tabloids.
19	Alicia Vikander		691,378	This willowy Swedish actress has gone from a complete unknown to Oscar winner in one year, thanks to her win for The Danish Girl. This award tends to skew young, which can make it something of an albatross for a burgeoning career. Sometimes, as with Angelina Jolie, it works out. Other times, as with Mira Sorvino or Marisa Tomei, not so much. Here's hoping she carries it well.
20	Republican Party presidential primaries, 2016		668,247	Our readers are favouring the Republican race over the Democratic by a narrow eight percent, which is understandable given the carnival cavalcade it has proven to be.
21	List of awards and nominations received by Leonardo DiCaprio		664,002	Yes, this is his first Oscar, in case you were wondering.
22	Academy Awards		613,396	See #3
23	Deaths in 2016		612,628	The annual list of deaths has always been a fairly consistent visitor to this list, averaging about 500,000 views a week. Since the death of David Bowie, this article's views have jumped on average, but may slowly be returning to the mean.
24	Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2016		591,468	Despite a sweep of wins across the South, Hillary Clinton has yet to secure the prize, with Bernie Sanders still very much in contention, with high-population states like California and Florida still to come.
25	Stephen Curry		560,285	On February 27, against the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Golden State Warriors player not only broke his own record for 3-point shots in a single season but, with 0.6 seconds on the clock, scored a shot from an astonishing 38 feet (11.6 m) out, leading some commentators to wonder if the best shooter in the history of the NBA was actually fully human.

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.

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