Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (January 4 to 10, 2015)

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Summary: It's a grim certainty what topic most interested Wikipedia viewers this week. The horrific attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine have drawn anger and resolve from around the world, and also the attention of an English-speaking world that had previously never heard of it. Four articles tied to the event appeared this week. On a lighter note, this week also saw a fairly strong showing for Reddit, with three Reddit-inspired threads in the list for the first time since October.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of January 4 to 10, 2015, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Charlie Hebdo	2,744,884	There have been far more heinous acts of terror committed in the name of Islam; in the days leading up to this attack, as many as 2000 people were murdered in Nigeria by Boko Haram. But it would take a skilled writer to envision an act more symbolic. A group of obsessive theocrats savage a longstanding French satirical magazine for the crime of violating their religious custom, carving a jagged gash between piety and freedom of expression. They go on to murder a Muslim police officer in cold blood. Another gunman targets a kosher market, murdering four more for the crime of being Jewish, while a Muslim employee risks his life to save the survivors. A better fable of the wrenching complexities inherent in the defining cultural divide of our time could not be asked for, were it not written in blood.
2	Stuart Scott	2,651,945	The well-liked "hip hop" sportscaster for ESPN's SportsCenter died this week of cancer, aged just 49.
3	Chris Kyle	1,239,352	This American sniper, whose life was the subject of the appropriately named Clint Eastwood-directed film American Sniper, which went into wide release on Christmas Day, is considered the most lethal in US military history, with 160 confirmed kills. Unfortunately, he was murdered last year by a PTSD-afflicted veteran whom he had taken to a shooting range. Before he died, he had claimed that he had once punched former wrestler and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura in 2006 for badmouthing U.S. President Bush and the military. Ventura sued him for defamation, eventually getting a $1.8 million jury award. Last month, Ventura filed a new lawsuit directly against HarperCollins, who published Kyle's book, called, naturally, American Sniper.
4	Charlie Hebdo shooting	943,186	See #1.
5	PK (film)	801,316	Numbers are still strong for this Bollywood film, starring Aamir Khan and Anushka Sharma. Released on December 19, it has already become the highest grossing Bollywood film of all time, with a worldwide box office of over US$90 million. The first Bollywood film to ever top this report, it also had the highest ever opening weekend gross for a Bollywood film in the US, at $3.75 million.
6	André the Giant	612,635	The beloved wrestler, best known to the wider world for playing Fezzik in The Princess Bride, became the subject of a Reddit thread this week, when a poster learned that, due to his prodigious height, as a child he was too large to ride the bus to school and so was driven there every day by his neighbour, modernist playwright Samuel Beckett, of Waiting For Godot fame.
7	Stephen Hawking	604,214	The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon makes his tenth straight appearance in the Top 25 this week, thanks in large part to his biopic, The Theory of Everything, which opened in the United States on November 7, and this week won a Golden Globe for Eddie Redmayne, who portrays him in the film.
8	UFC 182	568,848	Wikipedia readers are a pugnacious lot, and whenever a close-contact combat sporting event occurs, you can bet it will end up somewhere in the report. This year's Ultimate Fighting Championship was headlined by light-heavyweight champion Jon Jones who successfully defended his title against challenger Daniel Cormier.
9	London Stone	563,848	This mysterious limestone block in central London, attested since 1100 AD and possibly dating back to the Roman occupation of Britain, has been a subject of speculation for over four hundred years, as learned in a Reddit thread this week.
10	American Sniper (film)	557,963	Numbers are up for the second straight week for Clint Eastwood's latest directorial effort, released on Christmas Day.
11	Facebook	525,943	A perennially popular article.
12	Deaths in 2015	511,037	The viewing figures for this article have been remarkably constant; fluctuating week to week between 450 and 550,000, apparently heedless of who actually died.
13	Je suis Charlie	492,145	"I am Charlie", the call of defiant solidarity that spread throughout France and then the world after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, was also taken up by Wikipedia readers.
14	Agent Carter (TV series)	490,015	Marvel's second expansion of its cinematic universe into television (a 1940s-set spy series starring Hayley Atwell) debuted this week to so-so ratings.
15	Alan Turing	482,273	It is sobering to recall one who accomplished so much, only to be so utterly destroyed for so little. After laying the foundations for the philosophy of artificial intelligence, essentially inventing the programmable computer, and shortening World War II by an estimated two years by cracking the Enigma code, he was outed as a homosexual and forced to undergo a chemical castration, an ordeal which eventually drove him to suicide. As an added insult, his life's work became the subject of two films, U-571 and Enigma, neither of which saw fit to mention him. So the Oscar buzz Benedict Cumberbatch has received for portraying him in his first true cinematic biopic, The Imitation Game, carries some fairly historic undertones.
16	Reham Khan	463,389	Another double entry; this one about people who generated interest by marrying people more famous than themselves. Journalist and news presenter Reham Khan married former cricketer and populist Pakistani politician Imran Khan...
17	Benji Madden	456,758	while this guitarist and vocalist for the band The Madden Brothers married Cameron Diaz.
18	Elvis Presley	448,387	There are those who, I am told, believe that the King of Rock and Roll yet lives. If that is so, he must be desperate, because he celebrated his 80th birthday this week by auctioning off his first ever recording for $300,000; a fairly paltry sum, you might think, for one of the foundation stones of modern popular music. In any case, wouldn't it honour his legacy far more if it were given to, say, a museum?
19	Google	419,129	Always a fairly popular article.
20	Albert Einstein	408,322	Let's face facts; even if he weren't the most important physicist since Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein would still have been hard to miss in a crowd. And as a result, he took to telling the hoards of celeb-hounds constantly following him, "Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein." This fact was discussed at length in a Reddit thread this week.
21	List of highest-grossing Bollywood films	405,325	PK's recent topping of this list continues to draw attention.
22	Everybody Draw Mohammed Day	398,110	Depending on your point of view, this is either an anarchic, punk-inspired rallying cry for free speech, or cultural insensitivity played out on a global scale. Although apropos of current events, it actually dates to 2010, and derives, appropriately, from South Park. After its network, Comedy Central, censored the show's creators for depicting the prophet Mohammed, an act prohibited in the Hadith, cartoonist Molly Norris said that as many people as possible should draw Mohammed on May 20 that year, arguing that Muslim extremists couldn't go after everybody. Needless to say, Al-Qaeda was not pleased, and directly threatened her life, and Pakistan even blocked Facebook for a time in response. Whether similar events will follow next Everybody Draw Mohammed Day remains to be seen.
23	Adebayo Akinfenwa	396,380	This AFC Wimbledon striker is known as "the beast" for immediately apparent reasons; his 225-pound physique, a rarity in his profession, is not so much "body-builder" as "walking cliff face". As such, when he threatened to punch his teammates if they denied him his chance to secure the shirt of his idol (Liverpool FC's Steven Gerrard, soon to be departing for the US), they listened.
24	Nicole Kidman	387,626	She hasn't had a hit in a decade, but the Aussie star proved she can still create a media storm when she revealed to a shocked Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show that a previous meeting between them 10 years before, which he thought had been a business dinner, was in fact a blind date.
25	Taken 3	380,011	Liam Neeson's signature franchise comes to an end (or at least, so the critics hope) with this instalment, assuming that the producers can ignore a $39 million opening.

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.