The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (June 5 to 11, 2016)

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Summary: It's not uncommon for this list to become a parade of the dead; death is random, and often falls in quick succession. But as far as I remember, this is the first time the top three slots have been due to recent death. One, Muhammad Ali the final end of a long, respected and bountiful life; another, Kimbo Slice, the result of the strange random happenstance that seems to be the Reaper's hallmark. And then there's Christina Grimmie, a death so infuriatingly senseless and cruel that calling it tragic is too forgiving. And they weren't the only deaths either; aside from the eternally present Deaths list, hockey legend Gordie Howe also passed on this week after a long life. Outside the commemorations of Ali's life, our readers were mainly interested in traditional summer distractions: sports, movies and, of course, Game of Thrones.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of June 5 to 11, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Muhammad Ali	5,313,604	As I've said before in this article, I do not like sports. I do, however, like words, and while Muhammad Ali might not have been a wordsmith on par with, say, Yogi Berra, his beat-downs to beat and put-downs to poetry were often works of quiet wonder, and prefigured the braggadocio and diss tracks of hip-hop culture, with the added bonus of being backed up by actual talent and effort. So, let me, as a writer, let him speak his own epitaph: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can't hit what the eyes can't see. I’ve wrestled with alligators; I’ve tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning and throw thunder in jail. My face is so pretty, you don't see a scar, which proves I'm the king of the ring by far. Folks, don't block the gate, don't close the door, for you may all go home after round four. To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the U.S.A. won the medal of gold. The Greeks said, "You're better than the Cassius of old." OK, so he occasionally needed to work on his scansion. Note: If the numbers for the two days from last week are added in, the total is 9.74 million, which, in the Wikipedia Hall of the Dead, places Ali above Robin Williams but below Prince or David Bowie.
2	Kimbo Slice	1,918,617	The immensely popular boxer and mixed martial artist who got his start in true Millennial style by posting street fights on YouTube, died this week at the age of just 42. The immediate cause of his death was heart failure, though the ultimate cause is still unclear.
3	Christina Grimmie	1,581,651	Some things are difficult to talk about. It is a sad fact of American life that, just as people's lives can rise on a dime, so too can they end. That a minor singing celebrity who had built her entire career on her relationship with her fans could be brought down by a single, random, misfiring member of her fandom who happened to have a gun is both tragic and infuriating. That it happened in Orlando, Florida, now feels like a strange prelude.
4	UEFA Euro 2016	1,457,928	For the latest go round, held in France, the European international football tournament has been expanded from 16 to 24 teams, which means that most of the British Isles (bar Scotland) are competing together for the first time in decades. Of course, England's fans marked the occasion with a bit of hooliganism, as if the referendum weren't enough of a snub to Europe.
5	Copa América Centenario	997,904	The exhibition tournament between all ten members of CONMEBOL (the South American football federation) and six members of CONCACAF (the North American football federation) to celebrate 100 years of the South American international cup, the Copa America, kicked off on June 3.
6	Game of Thrones (season 6)	870,174	The latest season of this eternally popular TV series premiered on HBO on 24 April. With three episodes left in this season, we can expect it stay up on the chart.
7	The Conjuring 2	771,532	Fans of the supernatural may take some issue with the veracity of demonologist ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren, but there's no denying that The Conjuring, the first film based on their case files, was a highly effective (and highly successful) spookfest. The sequel, which reunites stars Vera Farmiga (pictured) and Patrick Wilson, has proven just as popular, with a solid 75% on Rotten Tomatoes and $91 million worldwide grossed in just three days.
8	Phoebe Snetsinger	767,213	The first person to observe and document over 8,000 bird species got a Google Doodle on her would-have-been 85th birthday on 9 June.
9	Warcraft (film)	723,881	Duncan "son of David Bowie" Jones's ode to the video game franchise he apparently loves has not wowed critics, with Rotten Tomatoes ranking it as the second-worst-reviewed film of the US summer season (the worst reviewed, if you're wondering, was the horror flick The Darkness, with just 5%, a score even Warcraft can look down on). Unsurprisingly, its domestic performance has been anaemic, coming in second to The Conjuring 2; its international performance, particularly in China, has, however, been fairly stellar, so Jones may come out of this with his well-earned good reputation intact.
10	Stephen Curry	699,006	This week, the basketball player for the Golden State Warriors and current MVP weathered some fierce criticism on social media for some ill-advised sneakers and three below-par games in a row, but appears to have bounced back in his latest game against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
11	Deaths in 2016	669,117	The views for the annual list of deaths are remarkably consistent on a day-to-day basis, with close to 100,000 views a day.
12	X-Men: Apocalypse	661,516	Hopes were high for this movie after the rapturous critical and commercial reception given to Bryan Singer's previous X-Men film, Days of Future Past; unfortunately the reviews for the followup have been largely negative, with the film struggling to reach a 60% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Numbers are down by half, suggesting audiences may be falling out of love with it too.
13	Ramadan	617,977	Islam began in lower latitudes, and probably didn't anticipate becoming a truly global religion when it instituted its holy month of fasting from sunrise to sunset. This has come to a particularly painful head this year when, thanks to Islam's lunar calendar, which causes the months to shift across the seasons, Ramadan began on June 5, a day which, in the UK, where I live, was over 16 hours long. But spare a thought for the Syrian refugees currently housed in the Swedish town of Kiruna, which sees no night at all for most of Ramadan. They must rely on fatwas issued by various Islamic clerics to determine when to fast and when to eat.
14	Game of Thrones	605,866	See #6.
15	Novak Djokovic	587,663	The world #1 Men's tennis player beat the #2, Andy Murray, for the second time in a row to clinch his twelfth grand slam at the French Open this week.
16	Issus (genus)	534,044	A Reddit thread this week learned that the larvae of the planthopper bug is the first living thing discovered to have evolved mechanical gears.
17	UFC 199	533,922	The mixed martial arts event was held on June 4, 2016 at The Forum in Inglewood, California with Michael Bisping (pictured) winning the headline match.
18	Donald Trump	526,676	Numbers are up, and it's not hard to see why: interest peaked on 7 June; the same date interest peaked for a judge named Gonzalo P. Curiel, the man trying Trump for fraud over the entirely-not-a-university Trump University. The date coincided with Trump's waffling attempt at a non-apology over remarks regarding Curiel's heritage that senior Republicans decried as racist.
19	Hillary Clinton	482,075	This may come as a surprise, but this is Hillary's first appearance on this list for more than a year. Not since she announced her intention to run for President has she garnered enough attention on Wikipedia to enter the Top 25, with most of the attention over the last 12 months going to her more flamboyant competitors, in particular Donald Trump (obviously) and Bernie Sanders. This week coincides with her apparent final clinching of the nomination, and her endorsement by Democratic leading lights Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren, making her the de facto nominee, to the chagrin of Sanders supporters everywhere.
20	Victoria Woodhull	481,065	Hillary Clinton is not the first woman nominee for President of the United States; she is only, as she was very careful to state in her addresses, the first woman nominee for President of the United States from a major party. In 1872, this spiritualist and "magnetic healer" ran for President on the Equal Rights Party ticket, but failed to win any electoral votes. Truth is, even if Hillary wins, her victory would not be as historic as it will doubtless be made out to be, as the United States has proven quite the laggard worldwide in electing female heads of state.
21	Gordie Howe	473,542	The fourth death on this list, and the third sports-related death, the 23-time NHL All Star known as "Mr Hockey" held most of the records in the sport until Wayne Gretzky broke them. Hockey has always been a combat sport, and, like two other departed on this list, Howe was known as a fighter. Indeed, he has a combat move, the Gordie Howe hat trick, named after him.
22	Laila Ali	473,001	Muhammad Ali's youngest daughter, with her knockout looks and former boxing career, was always the most media-friendly of his large extended family, so it's not surprising she's the only member on this list.
23	Dimitri Payet	472,085	The French national footballer became the hero of France's opening game against Romania in the penultimate minute.
24	List of Game of Thrones episodes	445,027	See #6.
25	Joe Frazier	432,436	Muhammad Ali was to "Smokin' Joe" what the polar regions were to Roald Amundsen: a beast conquered and thrown to the ground, only to rise up and ultimately subdue him. In three now-mythical bouts, the Fight of the Century, Super Fight II and the Thrilla in Manila, in which Frazier became the first person ever to defeat Ali, then lost to him, then finally conceded to him again in a gruelling tiebreak, are widely considered among the best fights in the sport's history. It is interesting that, in death, Ali still brought recognition to his greatest rival.

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 (~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. Since WP:5000 and WMF Topviews use different exclusion algorithms, articles that appear in one but not the other can also safely be excluded as false. 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.