The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (November 13 to 19, 2016)

Prepared with commentary by Serendipodous.

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

Waiting To Exhale: We are still coming down from last week, which saw the highest average numbers we've ever recorded, and numbers, while down from last week's ludicrous levels, are still not near normal. This list is also very similar to last week's, with only a small number of new entries. It's almost as if last week's list breathed in a swarm of numbers and is slowly now breathing them out.

For the week of November 13 to 19, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Donald Trump	3,321,262	Numbers are slowly returning to normal for America's 45th President. Would that his country could.
2	Steven Bannon	2,746,898	Apparently, the nation of America was shocked to the core when it learned that the head of the racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic Breitbart News, who had acted for months as Donald Trump's chief strategist, would continue to act as Donald Trump's chief strategist. What? You elect someone specifically to disrupt the status quo and you're surprised when the status quo is disrupted?
3	United States presidential election, 2016	1,693,874	Views peaked at 2.36 million on November 9.
4	Melania Trump	1,422,580	Mrs. Trump will be the first foreign-born First Lady of the United States since Louisa Adams in the 1820s. Louisa was British, so Melania will be the first non-native speaker of English to hold the title, which is a bit bizarre considering Trump's rhetoric on immigration. Though her English is not perfect, she does speak six languages; a feat few people, and fewer Americans, can claim.
5	Elizabeth II	1,354,307	For the third consecutive week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy.
6	UFC 205	1,215,708	The latest Ultimate Fighting Championship was held on November 12, 2016 at Madison Square Garden. The headline match was won by Conor McGregor who defeated Eddie Alvarez in a technical knockout in the second round.
7	Frederick Banting	1,203,940	The discoverer of insulin got a Google Doodle on his 125th birthday on November 14.
8	Ivanka Trump	1,148,947	No doubt the most liked Trump outside core Trump-fandom. Her views regularly exceeded those of her siblings. In the report for the July 2016 week of the Republican National Convention, Ivanka placed #4, ahead of her three adult siblings. (Trump's youngest child Barron Trump is only 10 years old and should not have his own article here, if the precedent set for Malia and Sasha Obama is applied.)
9	Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film)	1,137,420	This cinematic spinoff to the Harry Potter series, set in 1920s New York, and scripted by the books' author herself, JK Rowling (pictured), opened this week to decent notices (it currently has a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a solid, though unspectacular, $75 million US opening.
10	Conor McGregor	1,107,299	See #6.
11	Reince Priebus	1,059,955	The chairman of the Republican National Committee was appointed President-elect Donald Trump's chief of staff this week. Many saw it as a political play to the establishment wing of the Republican Party, many of whom were unnerved by his appointment of Steve Bannon.
12	Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon	1,025,311	The only sibling of Queen Elizabeth II, she is portrayed by Vanessa Kirby in The Crown television series.
13	Jared Kushner	998,800	The husband of Ivanka Trump (and the only member of the Trump clan who didn't show up last week) has risen in the public eye thanks to some Game of Thrones-style political machinations. You see, when Chris Christie was U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, he prosecuted Jared's father, Charles Kushner and obtained a two-year conviction for bribery and election tampering. With his brother-in-law's ear, Jared has been accused of using his position for payback, firing Christie from Trump's transition team and purging the inner ranks of anyone connected to him.
14	Alt-right	892,939	With the appointment of Steve Bannon as President Trump's chief strategist, the strange world illuminated by his former empire Breitbart News has affixed itself to mainstream politics. Like many movements born on the web, it lacks a coherent ideology, though raging misogyny and antifeminism appear to be universal tropes among the faithful. Before now, they were mainly famous for doxxing and harassing women activists on social media. It's going to be an interesting few years.
15	Electoral College (United States)	881,002	In the United States, the president is not elected by the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won, but by the "electoral college," which consists of 538 votes spread out over the 50 states and District of Columbia, and where the winner of the popular vote in each state (with the exception of two states) receives all the electoral votes for that state. This is the fifth time that the winner of the popular vote lost the election, the last being in 2000. When the counts are final, it is clear that the gap between Clinton and Trump will be largest ever instance of this issue. Trump thread the needle by getting close wins in the Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan while losing the popular vote by a large margin in populous states like California and New York.
16	Westworld (TV series)	852,149	To be clear: this is not based on a novel by Michael Crichton: Crichton was a filmmaker as well as a novelist, and Westworld was a film he both wrote and directed back in the 1970s. But whereas that was a straightforward "monsters on the loose" movie, about a Western-themed amusement park staffed by hyperrealistic robots who go insane and start murdering the guests (sound familiar?), this series looks like it will be taking a more thoughtful, hard scifi approach, with the robots' gradual evolution from programming to quasi-consciousness forming the main plot thread. With a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and ratings of just under 2 million (roughly what Game of Thrones received when it began), it's off to a solid start, though whether it will be the show to carry HBO past Game of Thrones's end remains to be seen.
17	Mannequin Challenge	843,232	The viral phenomenon began last month, but appears to have reached peak participation this week. What is it? Basically you film yourself standing completely still in a visually crowded environment to create the eerie sense of being outside time seen in films like The Matrix. Unlike the ice bucket challenge in 2014, it doesn't have the virtue of being for charity.
18	Leonard Cohen	822,962	The legendary cult Canadian songwriter and singer died on November 7 at age 82; his death was publicly announced on November 10. If he had died almost any other week, he would have led this chart. Though he never had a Top 40 hit, covers of his song Hallelujah have made that haunting composition very well-known. The opening skit of Saturday Night Live after the election featured Kate McKinnon as Clinton, playing the song with modified lyrics.
19	Gwen Ifill	806,582	The Peabody Award-winning journalist, who most recently moderated a Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, died this week of cancer at the relatively young age of 61.
20	Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh	725,687	The husband of Queen Elizabeth II, he is portrayed by Matt Smith in The Crown television series.
21	A Tribe Called Quest	725,208	The hip-hop world is not known for career longevity, and most of the early pioneers of the genre, such as Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy and even LL Cool J, have since moved on to other things. The same was true for A Tribe Called Quest, who split up in 1999, but this week released an album of songs recorded before their MC Phife Dawg died earlier this year from diabetes at the age of just 45.
22	George VI	724,595	Queen Elizabeth's dad made an appearance The Crown, in which he is played by Jared Harris. With 1.2 million views, these are really high numbers that The Crown related articles are generating. But for the election, we would be highlighting this success more vigorously.
23	Barack Obama	705,517	The outgoing president campaigned hard in favor of Hillary Clinton (#6) in the closing weeks of the campaign. Now he has to turn over power to the person who championed the awful lie of birtherism. There really is no way to sugarcoat this; it doesn't help to suggest that Donald Trump knew all along there was little to that baloney.
24	Deaths in 2016	691,712	The deaths list has always acted as this list's lodestone; it is so consistent on a day-to-day basis that where it appears is an indication of the weekly traffic levels. Last week, it was pushed to #34, the lowest we've ever seen it, and the only reason it managed to creep onto this list again this week was that it was hovering at the high end of its predicted range.
25	Tiffany Trump	670,001	Tiffany is Trump's only child with Marla Maples, his second wife. Tiffany was #10 on the chart in July when she spoke at the Republican National Convention, but generally she has kept a much lower profile than the other Trump children. Her article got more views than that of Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, possibly because people are looking more into the "lesser-known" Trump children after seeing Barron Trump on TV.

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.