The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (October 23 to 29, 2016)

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

Google to the Rescue: In a week where no article could break one million views, a Google Doodle celebrating Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who discovered bacteria, tops the chart. Replacing the dominance of U.S. politics with an article about the human search for knowledge is heartening. Beyond that, Wikipedia readers filled their brains with The Walking Dead television show, filling up three slots in the Top 10, and six in the Top 25.

As prepared by Milowent, for the week of October 23 to 29, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Antonie van Leeuwenhoek	970,522	For the first time this year, the top article of the week received under one million views. (The last time was when Donald Trump led with 914K views for December 6–12, 2015.) Yet, the top honors still go to the Dutch scientist, whose birthday was celebrated by a Google Doodle on October 24 which celebrated his discovery of "little animals", or animalcules, now known as bacteria.
2	The Walking Dead (TV series)	967,104	Season 7 (#8) of the popular television show, a mainstay of this chart when it is airing, debuted on October 23.
3	Donald Trump	898,740	No matter what you do, Donald Trump is always near the top of your Internet. Pageviews shows his views were steady this week, in the general range of 110-150K per day, except for Saturday Oct 29 when it received only 81,915 views.
4	Pete Burns	771,654	The leader of the band Dead or Alive, best known for the 1985 hit You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), died on October 23 at age 57 of cardiac arrest. You Spin Me Round was a fairly eccentric song to became a hit in the United States. In later years, Burns' received attention in British media when he appeared on Celebrity Big Brother 4 in 2006.
5	Chicago Cubs	764,703	The American baseball team has not won a World Series since 1908, but made it to the 2016 World Series, playing against the Cleveland Indians.
6	Negan	742,226	The Walking Dead character first appeared in the last season's finale.
7	Halloween	728,419	Views were up in anticipation of the October 31 holiday.
8	The Walking Dead (season 7)	719,418	See #2.
9	List of Black Mirror episodes	711,183	Series 3 of the British show Black Mirror (#14) created by Charlie Brooker (pictured) debuted on October 21.
10	Doctor Strange (film)	684,854	The Marvel superhero film based on the character of Doctor Strange had its Hollywood premiere on October 20, and in the UK and some other markets on October 25. It will debut in the United States on November 4. Benedict Cumberbatch stars in the title role.
11	Deaths in 2016	639,792	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.
12	Westworld (TV series)	635,234	Down from #4 and 730K views last week. 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.
13	Ae Dil Hai Mushkil	626,199	This Indian romantic film debuted whose cast includes Aishwarya Rai (pictured) had its debut on October 28.
14	Black Mirror	620,816	See #9.
15	Curse of the Billy Goat	617,355	Spike in views on October 23 helped push this above 2016 World Series.
16	Diwali	609,104	The Hindu festival of light draws attention to the inner light beyond the material body, the Atman.
17	Jeffrey Dean Morgan	555,799	Plays the role of #6 on #2.
18	Hillary Clinton	551,295	Clinton continues to be less interesting to our readers than Trump, she really needs to start saying some crazy stuff if she wants to win the Wikipedia ratings wars.
19	Jessica Drake	545,217	Views on the article for this porn star rose to 282,030 on October 23 and then tailed off the following few days. I figured this could be hard to figure out why without visiting a blocked website, but no, it's because she is one of those who has made sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump.
20	Cleveland Indians	505,907	One of the two teams in the 2016 World Series, who were hoping that #15 would help them.
21	Lady Gaga	464,074	Gaga's new album Joanne was released on October 21.
22	List of The Walking Dead episodes	439,252	See #2, #8, etc.
23	United States presidential election, 2016	437,573	IT NEVER ENDS! Can't wait for the 2020 season.
24	Steven Yeun	431,932	Yuen plays the role of Glenn Rhee on #2.
25	Huma Abedin	417,226	A top advisor to Hillary Clinton, views started to rise on October 28, and hit 272K views on October 29 (the last day of this chart). This probably is related to Clinton-related emails allegedly being found on the laptop of her husband Anthony Weiner, and likely a subject of little substance to be explored further in next week's report.

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.

YouTube: A one-day spike on October 23, all desktop views. Although a relatively popular article on a day-to-day basis, it would not be in the Top 25 without that artificial spike.

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