Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/July 1 to 7, 2018

The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (July 1 to 7, 2018)

Prepared with commentary by igordebraga (with help from Stormy clouds)

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And Moscow football makes me sing and shout

As expected, the FIFA World Cup is still dominating. And given recent developments in the Russian fields, you might notice my attempts at venting off tournament frustrations (my Welsh and Irish Report colleagues have already done it, so why not me?). The only entries not related to football are superheroes out of Hollywood (both live-action from Marvel and animated from Cartoon Network), action star biopics out of Bollywood, basketball stars gone Hollywood, holidays out of the U.S., historical figures out of Google Doodles, and those out of the 2018 deaths category.

For the week of July 1 to 8, 2018, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	2018 FIFA World Cup	3,640,351	In spite of many, many matches where teams seem to have forgotten how to score, the tournament has had its share of fun and surprises. Except when it involves your national team getting eliminated, double if it involves bad playing and\or incompetence (scoring at your own net!), along with the refs refusing to give your team a penalty. Anyways, with four teams from the Old World in the semifinals, Russia also involuntarily became host of an edition of the UEFA European Championship.
2	FIFA World Cup	1,418,501	Every four years, football fans have a whole month of the best the sport has to offer. And given 2022 will be in a country with no sport tradition that is so hot that the event will happen during the winter, followed by 2026 screwing up the formula by adding 16 teams and putting everyone in groups of 3, we'd best cherish the 2018 edition while it doesn't end.
3	List of FIFA World Cup finals	1,334,534	2018 can have a new team getting to the decision end of the tournament. Still, whoever gets there will still be a far cry from Brazil's 5 titles.
4	Sanju	1,294,947	India is currently giving big crore to the biopic of a Bollywood action star (depicted by Ranbir Kapoor, pictured), depicting his turbulent rise to prominence and subsequent fall from grace (including an arrest for possessing illegal firearms).
5	Sanjay Dutt	1,246,193
6	Cristiano Ronaldo	1,137,751	The last time Brazil won the World Cup, they had two Ronaldos, one of whom was the tournament's top player and scorer. Eventually colonizer Portugal got their own Ronaldo, who following four attempts will probably retire from the national team without lifting the FIFA trophy. Still, we have to admire CR7's pechant for challenge: tired of winning everything with Real Madrid, he's signing with Juventus F.C..
7	LeBron James	1,128,107	After eight straight seasons winning the NBA's Eastern Conference, LeBron is finally letting someone else have a chance by going west and signing with the Los Angeles Lakers. Here's to the Golden State Warriors struggling against him all year long!
8	Ant-Man and the Wasp	1,006,275	For the second time, Marvel follows an Avengers movie with a flick about this size-shifting superhero. Only this time, as the title makes clear, there is a female co-lead to help Ant-Man in his fight (next year comes the woman-centered Captain Marvel). Given Ant-Man and the Wasp is both the latest installment in a license to print money while providing the levity that fans need following the downer that was the ending of Avengers: Infinity War (to the point it's getting even better reviews than that movie!), expect big box office numbers and article views.
9	Jordan Pickford	993,723	England pulled off what many thought to be impossible: winning a penalty shootout! Following three defeats apiece in both the Euro and the World Cup, the defeat of Colombia owed much to goalkeeper Pickford saving one of the South American kicks. Another good performance followed in the quarterfinals, and the Everton keeper will surely aim to emulate his stoic performance against Luka Modric and his Croat colleagues.
10	Kylian Mbappé	926,100	At the age of just 19, Mbappé already has three goals in the FIFA World Cup. And for personal reasons, I'm all for him reaching the finals, by Toutatis!
11	Neymar	909,969	The standout player of the Brazilian team, who as a result is hunted by the adversary and falls all the time, to the amusement of some and criticism of others. But unlike some teammates, including a striker who finished the Cup goalless, Neymar at least always tried and sometimes succeeded in an underwhelming Brazilian campaign.
12	Harry Kane	872,971	With a name that just lends itself to "Rock You Like a Hurricane" jokes, Kane is the current top scorer of the FIFA World Cup with 6 goals, half of them coming from penalty kicks.
13	Independence Day (United States)	872,344	"We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!"
14	Croatia	830,916	Like Uruguay last week, it's a small country with less than 5 million people that earns global recognition for its football (played with checkered shirts that are often compared to tablecloths). Many people probably first heard of this former Yugoslav republic witnessing Davor Suker and co. achieve a surprise run to third place in the 1998 FIFA World Cup, and twenty years later, Luka Modric and friends brought the team back to the semifinals following a defeat of hosts Russia.
15	Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz	789,663	ΔGoogle/Δy - The search engine giants paid homage to this man, who contributed to many fields of science, most notably mathematics with his discovery of calculus (leading to an infamous feud with Sir Isaac Newton) and the binary number system that is the foundation of computers.
16	Gareth Southgate	767,284	The current success of English team, which rides heavily upon the backs of our #9 and #12, and has seen their return to the semifinals after 28 years, is responsible for boosting the views of the coach behind the team.
17	Deaths in 2018	737,558	Among the recently deceased are Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko (who actually died the previous week) and those cultists who released sarin gas in a Tokyo subway.
18	England national football team	688,493	It's coming home? Well, better you than Belgium! Though our #14 stands in the way.
19	2014 FIFA World Cup	681,209	Should I be embarrassed of having attended a match and being among the Belgian supporters? Or that I made a Good Article out of a national embarrassment that happened in that same stadium? Anyway, people are remembering the previous World Cup, which was really entertaining. OOOH EEEEH AAAH!
20	Lionel Messi	651,396	♪Don't Cry for Me Argentina ... ♪
21	List of Steven Universe episodes	616,989	A view spike came for this popular Cartoon Network series due to new episodes coming all through the week, which are apparently called "Stevenbombs".
22	Kasper Schmeichel	571,943	Kasper is following the steps of his father Peter Schmeichel in keeping the Danish goal safe, and Denmark's round of 16 against Croatia had him saving one penalty during extra time and another two in the subsequent shootout. Unfortunadely, his Balkanic counterpart Danijel Subašić (who during regulation let in quite a soft goal) one-upped him with three to help Croatia win the game.
23	Harry Maguire	566,853	England faced Sweden in the World Cup quarterfinals, and the score was opened by this defender.
24	Romelu Lukaku	556,298	After helping Belgium get a comeback against Japan that only ended in the last minute of stoppage time, Lukaku returned the "Red Devils" to the World Cup semifinals after 32 years. A game where I'll be screaming "Allez les Bleus!"
25	Sunil Dutt	542,006	The father of #5, who launched his career with the movie Rocky, which unfortunately isn't a remake of the Stallone classic with Bollywood musical numbers.

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 (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% 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.