The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (October 16 to 22, 2016)

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Un-Presidential Politics 2: Electic Bugaboo: At this point, Donald Trump is appearing less like a vulgar, repulsive buffoon and more like a monster that mother democracies use to scare their kids into behaving. "Don't split your vote! Or the Trunyip will get you!" His refusal to say whether he will accept the result if he loses, and thus enable the functioning of the democratic system, was described, rightly, by Hillary Clinton as horrifying. I dunno if this is just Trump dressing up for Halloween, or if he is really that clueless; either way, it suggests the horror is not over for us all, whether he wins or not. In other news, Reddit cracked the 5-topic barrier again. I wonder if this is the new normal or just an artefact of the end of summer?

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of October 16 to 22, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Donald Trump	2,140,830	The second U.S. presidential debate was nasty; this one was scary. Trump's statement that he would "keep us in suspense" regarding whether or not he would accept the election result (an election he has already repeatedly described as "rigged") may have engendered more suspense than he intended (or not. Who knows?), as people began to fear for the first time in over a decade that the very system they live under might actually break.
2	Witch window	831,274	I'd need to check but this could be the highest-charting Reddit thread since we started the project. These diagonal windows, found almost exclusively in 19th century farmhouses in Vermont, were intended to ward off witches, since they couldn't fly their broomsticks through them. OK, so what about all the other windows? The thread's popularity is likely down to the approach of Halloween, a holiday that usually has little impact on this list.
3	2004 Harvard–Yale prank	739,821	Another Reddit thread, this one concerning a practical joke at the annual Harvard-Yale football game in which Yale supporters handed out cards for the Harvard supporters to flash which, when used together, spelled out "WE SUCK". You gotta hand it to whoever came up with that, and even more for pulling it off.
4	Westworld (TV series)	729,784	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.
5	Logan (film)	669,776	The next film in the X-Men film series will feature the final outings of both Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Hugh Jackman as Logan, a.k.a Wolverine. The surprisingly touching trailer launched this week, and generated a great deal of positive buzz.
6	Hillary Clinton	650,343	Clinton continues to be less interesting to our readers than Trump, despite public opinion appearing to agree that she won all three debates.
7	Michel'le	646,377	The R&B singer and former girlfriend of both Dr Dre and alleged murderer Suge Knight, both of whom she claims beat her repeatedly, was the subject of a hit docudrama on Lifetime this week, Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge & Michel'le.
8	Melania Trump	631,945	Spouse of #1.
9	Deaths in 2016	606,553	The views for the annual list of deaths are remarkably consistent on a day-to-day basis. It is consistently higher in the first half of 2016 with a string of highly notable deaths, but things seem to be calming down a bit. Where the article appears in this chart is entirely dependent on how many subjects in a week happened to exceed this bellwether in views.
10	Dr. Dre	486,086	The billionaire music producer and ex-boyfriend of Michel'le (see above) filed a cease and desist order against the premiere of the docudrama Surviving Compton, claiming that he never beat her, as the program alleges. He also threatened to sue Michel'le for defamation of character.
11	Bill Goldberg	474,744	The popular professional wrestler returned to the WWE this week at the surprising age of 49.
12	United States presidential election, 2016	471,371	Otherwise known as that game of Russian roulette we've all been playing in slow motion for the last 18 months.
13	Black robin	554,840	Another Reddit thread, this one involving Old Blue, the last fertile female black robin, who effectively became the mother of her species after increasing its population from 6 to 250 in her remarkable 14-year lifespan.
14	Aaron Lewis	631,945	Another Reddit thread, about how the lead singer of Staind, after having criticised Christina Aguilera for flubbing the American national anthem, went on to make exactly the same mistake himself.
15	American Horror Story: Roanoke	458,938	The sixth season of American Horror Story debuted on September 14. It invokes the story of England's failed attempt to establish a colony in America in the 1580s, where by 1590 all inhabitants had disappeared and could not be located. The only clue left behind by the "lost colony" was the word "CROATOAN" carved into a post.
16	Tron	443,349	ANOTHER Reddit thread, about how Disney's seminal 1982 cyber-fantasy was disallowed a visual effects Oscar because the Academy thought using CGI was "cheating".
17	Bob Dylan	438,263	The famed singer-songwriter won the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 13. A rather unusual pick, and thus one getting a fair amount of attention.
18	Pablo Escobar	425,827	Narcos is back on your television screens, meaning Don Pablo is back on the list for another week.
19	Facebook	417,322	Last year, the world's most popular social network site was a permanent fixture on this list. I was pretty sure it was gone for good, but now it's back. Since Facebook interfaces with pretty much every aspect of modern life, trying to track reasons for its popularity is essentially impossible.
20	List of Bollywood films of 2016	397,326	Generally a popular yearly list article, often slightly below the Top 25.
21	Barack Obama	384,688	The man who, for the next 88 days, remains President of the United States got a boost in views over his final official White House state dinner.
22	Billy Bush	377,228	It's been quite a few months for the cousin of Jeb and Dubya. First he was blasted for failing to catch Ryan Lochte out on his preschool lying, and then he was seen giggling along as Donald Trump gleefully recounted how often he got away with sexual molestation.
23	Aberfan disaster	363,534	October 21 marked the 50th anniversary of this truly hideous man-made disaster, still little known outside Britain, in which an unstable coal spoil tip collapsed, unleashing a lahar of slurry that entombed a school in the village of Aberfan (pronounced "abbervan") in Wales, ending the lives of 116 children. As per usual with events such as this, power would not yield to desolation, and the survivors were forced to pay £150,000 of their own disaster relief fund to have the tip closed.
24	The Rocky Horror Picture Show	355,699	The Fox Network had a hit with Grease: Live last year so, what did they decide to do next? A remake of Rocky Horror. Not a live performance, which at least would have made sense, but an actual redo of the movie itself, with different actors. Yes. They've finally remade Rocky Horror, a movie whose entire appeal is that it never changes. Needless to say it was a massive bomb, and Fox have surely learned their lesson. Right?
25	Old Man Logan	353,330	The post-apocalyptic X-Men comic series created by Mark Millar formed the inspiration for the upcoming Logan movie (see above).

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. 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.