Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/October 13 to 19, 2019

The Top 25 Report

This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous.
Such material is not meant to be taken seriously.

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (October 13 to 19, 2019)

Prepared with commentary by Igordebraga

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The Joker is wild, you know he's got a lot of views

While It Chapter Two didn't have the lasting power of the first on our report, the same can't be said of another monster clown, albeit one more human: Batman's nemesis Joker, whose solo movie has topped the list for three weeks and brought along the character (#23), the main actor (#4) and his late older brother (#25), and even the last guy who earned acclaim for the role (#13). More movies can also be found, on American (#14, #18, #24) and Indian (#9, #17) theaters, and also Netflix (#8, #12). Speaking of India, the country produced a Nobel winner (#6) who was awarded along with his missus (#11). Present as always are the recently deceased (#2, #5, #7, #16), politics (#10), sports (#15), holidays (#22), Google Doodles (#3), and r/TodayILearned threads (#19), with the not-that-common additions of K-pop (#20) and journalists (#21) to complete the list.

For the week of October 13 to 19, 2019, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Views	About
1	Joker (2019 film)	2,163,336	Jared Leto apparently tried to block this movie from being made, given Warner Bros. had promised a solo Joker film for him, only to greenlight this unrelated 1970s throwback instead. And now Joker is almost outgrossing Leto's maligned take in Suicide Squad, with much more positive reviews, to boot.
2	Sulli	1,388,588	Ever since "Gangnam Style", K-pop has broken out in surprising ways, specially for those who write and read this report. And this entry related to South Korean music is a sad one, as singer\actress Choi "Sulli" Jin-ri committed suicide at just 25, following cyberbullying taking its toll on her troubled psyche.
3	Joseph Plateau	1,076,405	Google celebrated this Belgian physicist whose research on optics led to the phenakistiscope, one of those disks that when spun create the illusion of a moving image.
4	Joaquin Phoenix	1,031,901	For those who remember the I'm Still Here days where Joaquin Phoenix had seemingly gone insane and decided to go from acting to rapping, him becoming the certified insane Joker in our #1 seemed like natural casting.
5	Elijah Cummings	940,273	The big death of the week, a Maryland politician who had over two decades at the House of Representatives and this year took over the Committee on Oversight and Reform.
6	Abhijit Banerjee	905,237	Indians getting big views, no surprise here. Though this one had a global interest reason for it, as Banerjee, alongside his wife (#11) and Michael Kremer, won the Nobel Prize in Economics for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
7	Deaths in 2019	746,129	Last night the wife said "oh, boy when you're dead, You don't take nothing with you, but your soul, think!"
8	El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie	712,432	The show Honest Trailers described as "so powerful, you binge-watch it on Netflix; so all-consuming, you push it on your friends, even if they don't watch TV; and so addicting, you can't shut up about it. It's basically like drugs." gets a Netflix epilogue centered around Aaron Paul's character Jesse Pinkman, that also served as an epitaph for one of its actors (#16).
9	War (2019 film)	666,731	This Bollywood action epic starring Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff is now the highest-grossing Indian movie of the year.
10	Tulsi Gabbard	624,330	Hillary Clinton claimed that Russia was "grooming" a female Democrat to run as a third-party candidate who would help President Trump win reelection via the spoiler effect. Many in the media interpreted that as being Hawaiian Representative Gabbard, who denied running independently if not chosen and had other candidates defending her.
11	Esther Duflo	490,812	The French wife of our #6, making them the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel Prize.
12	Fractured (2019 film)	463,840	One more Netflix movie, where Sam Worthington is the father of a family that ends up in a questionable emergency room.
13	Heath Ledger	454,570	Ten years ago, the Academy gave a posthumous Best Supporting Actor Oscar to the Australian actor who sadly couldn't see how well everyone responded to his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. Now his good friend Joaquin Phoenix (#4) has taken over the role with equal acclaim, and some even question whether he might get the same awards recognition.
14	Maleficent: Mistress of Evil	447,873	Disney's wave of yearly live-action remakes of their cartoons begun in 2014 with the Sleeping Beauty perspective flip Maleficent, that in spite of being misguided (a villainess whose name downright screams "evil" becoming a misunderstood anti-heroine) made loads of cash. So now Angelina Jolie is back as Maleficent, now entering a conflict with Michelle Pfeiffer as Aurora's future mother-in-law, in a movie that again combines great visuals with a questionable plot. Audiences didn't care, as it ousted our #1 from the top of the box office and almost recouped the $185 million budget in just a weekend.
15	UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying	439,870	Fútbol, fútbol, fútbol! Next year's European championship got its first six qualified squads, Belgium, Italy, Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Spain.
16	Robert Forster	431,177	The same day Forster's return to his Breaking Bad role Ed Galbraith hit Netflix (#8), he passed away, closing a career that included an Academy Award nomination for Jackie Brown (this writer particularly remembers Forster on Heroes).
17	List of Bollywood films of 2019	422,548	The Hindi film industry's yearly releases, full of Khans and Kapoors - one of them, Vaani Kapoor (pictured) is on our #9.
18	Gemini Man (film)	419,273	Will Smith and a younger version of himself star in the latest movie by Ang Lee, who goes for visual thrills similar to Life of Pi, but apparently without the same enthralling story, given the tepid response by reviewers and audiences.
19	Pseudofolliculitis barbae	412,626	Reddit had a discussion stimulated by this skin affliction, commonly referred to as "shave bumps", because Domino's Pizza was declared in violation of the 1991 Civil Rights Act when it demanded its male employees be clean-shaven, even though roughly a quarter of African Americans are unable to shave without incurring it.
20	Ronan Farrow	411,995	The journalist who broke out of the shadow of famous parents Woody Allen and Mia Farrow by unearthing the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations has released a book regarding said investigation, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.
21	SuperM	384,754	More K-pop, though thankfully not for sad reasons like #2, as this supergroup has been appearing on American TV and became the first Korean act to debut at #1 on the Billboard 200.
22	Christopher Columbus	375,116	October 12 celebrates the arrival of this Italian's flotilla to the Americas in 1492, and given how bad Columbus was at managing the new colonies, it's questioned whether he deserves the recognition.
23	Joker (comics)	360,292	"I'm a joker (#1, #4, 13) I'm a smoker I'm a midnight toker I get my lovin' on the run...'
24	Zombieland: Double Tap	355,529	The funniest zombie movie ever (Shaun of the Dead sucks!) got a sequel, bringing back Emma Stone (pictured), Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson and Abigail Breslin as four survivalists named after cities, who roam through an undead-filled USA. Reviews for Zombieland: Double Tap were positive and the movie opened at #3 in the box office behind #14 and #1.
25	River Phoenix	349,460	The older brother of #4, an acclaimed former child star who died of a drug overdose. Amusingly, #26 is another acclaimed former child star who died of a drug overdose, Judy Garland (currently depicted on Judy).

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.
- Apple Network Server, Brooklyn, Coca-Cola, Kepler's Supernova - No reasonable explanation for the views spike.

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