The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (October 2 to 8, 2016)

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Real life? Or Just fantasy? The main theme this week, as it is for many weeks, is real life drama clashing with unabashed escapism. The trauma of Hurricane Matthew, the nausea of Donald Trump's behaviour and the caterwaul that was the vice-Presidential debate came up against the premiere of Luke Cage, Netflix's latest Marvel property, the release of the film adaptation of The Girl On The Train, and Westworld, the first of what will likely be many attempts by HBO to find a successor to Game of Thrones. TV also appeared in the guise of Pablo Escobar, "star" of docudrama Narcos, and Amanda Knox, the acquitted murder suspect and subject of an eponymous documentary, also on Netflix. One television property notable in its absence however, is Stranger Things, which finally left this list after (appropriately) eleven straight weeks.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of October 2 to 8, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Luke Cage	1,486,560	Marvel's Blaxploitation-themed superhero (a.k.a. Power Man) has been a cult favourite for decades (Nicolas Cage named himself after him), but has never seen mainstream success, until now; as played by Mike Colter, pictured, he stars as the hero of his own eponymous series on Netflix.
2	Westworld (TV series)	1,050,532	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.
3	Luke Cage (TV series)	1,018,198	The latest in Marvel Studios' Netflix stable premiered in its entirety on September 30. It was reportedly so popular that it overloaded Netflix's servers and shut it down.
4	Donald Trump	972,408	My biweekly game of "What Did Donald Do?" is unfailingly joyless and often fruitless, but I occasionally strike gold: in this case, a decade-old tape in which he not only admits to repeated sexual assault but leeringly ogles a soap opera star. Numbers shot up after the revelation, but went up even further on the 10th, after the second Presidential debate, so expect him to be higher next week.
5	M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story	818,538	Numbers have doubled for this Indian biographical sports film about cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni, which debuted on September 30. The lead role is played by Sushant Singh Rajput (pictured).
6	Sushant Singh Rajput	782,830	The star of M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (see above)
7	Hurricane Matthew	721,520	When Wikipedia describes a hurricane as the worst since 2005 (aka the year that God idly pondered redoing that whole Flood thing) that sets you back in your chair, and to know that most of the more than 1000 deaths have been in Haiti, a country that by now must feel God has forsaken it, deepens the sense of loss and hopelessness. Noam Chomsky once predicted that Haiti may soon become uninhabitable. We can only do our best to ensure that does not happen.
8	"Never Gonna Give You Up"	682,050	Maybe if Reddit didn't have such a useless search engine I wouldn't hate it so much. I need to come up with a new word for that feeling when you know an entry on this list has to be from Reddit but the entire Internet is just shrugging its shoulders at you and going "Idno". I admit, that would not be a widely applicable word, but still, I would use it. And I did find the entry in the end. Rick Astley did a Reddit AMA this week; "AMA" stands for "ask me anything", but apparently what they wanted to know about was that godawful song that spawned a universe of unfunny Internet memes. You know, I never cared about that song one way or the other when it came out. Now I hate it. Such is the power of the Internet.
9	Amanda Knox	674,318	Another case of the media constructing a story it had no cause to, in this case the conviction (and later acquittal) of this American student of the murder of her British roommate while in Italy. The British tabloids being what they are, I refused to go within a mile of its toxicity, particularly when they started calling her "Foxy Knoxy" and painting her as a femme fatale. So far had I put this from my mind that I was surprised to learn she had been acquitted. Her trial and tribulations have become the subject of a Netflix documentary, called, oddly enough, Amanda Knox, which was released this week.
10	Westworld	671,142	It's possible I suppose that our readers are genuinely interested in the original 1973 cult classic starring Yul Brynner, but most likely it's just people looking for the TV series (see #2)
11	The Girl on the Train (novel)	663,079	Strangely, it is the London-set novel, and not the New York-set film, that has drawn attention in the wake of its release to tepid reviews but strong box office returns.
12	Pablo Escobar	616,164	Narcos is back on your television screens, meaning Don Pablo is back on the list for another week.
13	Deaths in 2016	597,878	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.
14	Billy Bush	574,343	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. Needless to say, he's currently out of a job. A status currently endemic in the Bush clan, it would appear.
15	Mike Pence	545,091	The man widely regarded to have "won" the Vice Presidential debate (though how anyone could have won that content-free shoutfest is beyond me) also beat his rival in Wikipedia views; Tim Kaine barely made the list at #25.
16	Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales	544,730	The trailer for the fifth (!) instalment in this undying franchise, featuring Javier Bardem as a kind of zombie Anton Chigurh, premiered this week. Can you believe it's taken five films and 13 years for Pirates of the Caribbean to finally use its signature tagline?
17	Joe Frazier	529,363	As learned in a Reddit thread this week, "Smokin' Joe", one of only five people to ever beat Muhammad Ali in the ring, received a pledge from Ali that, should Frazier beat him, Ali would crawl across the ring and call him the greatest, atoning for all the times he dissed him as an uncle tom. He didn't.
18	"We Are the World"	479,012	The track composed by Michael Jackson (pictured) and Lionel Richie and intended to raise money for the 1983–85 famine in Ethiopia, was recorded incredibly quickly. In fact, Stevie Wonder informed his fellow stars that if the song wasn't recorded in one take, he and Ray Charles would be driving everyone home, as learned in a Reddit thread this week.
19	Hillary Clinton	452,157	No major spikes this week (though the debate will see a spike at the start of next week).
20	Diamondback (comics)	449,469	The adversary of Luke Cage appeared as the "big bad" in the first season of the Netflix series (see #1)
21	American Horror Story: Roanoke	437,462	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.
22	Frank Sinatra Jr	406,874	Reddit learned this week that when Frank Sinatra's son was kidnapped, the kidnappers demanded that all communication be by payphones. Frank Sr was so terrified of running out of coins that he never left his house without a roll of dimes, and was buried with a roll in his pocket.
23	Kim Kardashian	411,107	The gravitational well at the centre of the entire Kardashian family was robbed at gunpoint in Paris this week, and relieved of millions of dollars in jewellery.
24	Hurricane Katrina	405,881	The devastation of Hurricane Matthew brought back memories of the worst hurricane in modern memory, though in fact Matthew was nowhere near as damaging as Katrina, and was even "beaten" by Hurricane Stan, which appeared the same year as Katrina.
25	Tim Kaine	394,598	The "loser" of this week's vice Presidential debate, apparently.

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.