The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (September 11 to 17, 2016)

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Anniversaries: The anniversaries of historic events are frequent visitors to this Report, but instead of being led by the 15th anniversary of the September 11 attacks (#4) this week, as we expected, we have the 11th anniversary of the Corrupted Blood incident (#1) video game event, which occurred in World of Warcraft and in which literally no one died, even the game's characters which can be reincarnated. We can all scratch our head over that one, but the ways of the internet are complex. See the chart comments for more on that. And the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Murder of JonBenét Ramsey comes in at #10 due to a new miniseries.

As prepared by Milowent, for the week of September 11 to 17, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the newly-revamped WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Corrupted Blood incident	1,636,405	Like professional wrestling, gaming is an activity that is very popular among a group of the population, yet most of the rest of us are not very aware of the goings-on in that area. And while wrestling events will often reach the top of this chart (SummerSlam 2016 hit #1 three weeks ago), gaming events simply don't do that. Yet, the 11th anniversary of this "virtual plague" in World of Warcraft drew a great deal of attention on September 13-14 (and 1.4M views on Sept 13, the actual anniversary). In this event, a game update included a new character that could inflict a "corrupted blood" disease that damaged characters over time. It could spread to nearby characters, but was not intended to spread out of the area where it was introduced. A programming error allowed the disease to spread, and it caused death and mass mayhem for a week. A primary driver of traffic was Reddit thread on the /r/gaming subreddit. Normally only Reddit threads from the /r/todayilearned subreddit can direct enough traffic to this chart, but the gaming thread already has over 5700 upvotes. Of course, the fact that this event got more views than the 15th anniversary of the September 11 attacks (#4) does not mean the this virtual plague got more worldwide attention. Instead it is just another example of how Wikipedia article popularity is only a proxy for measuring cultural attention.
2	Pablo Escobar	1,494,049	Down from 2.3 million views last view, but Narcos is back on your television screens for another week. Mobile views are on the high side again (73%) but nothing suggests these views are not legitimate.
3	Alexis Arquette	1,320,202	Arquette, part of the Arquette family of actors, and known for transitioning her gender to female, died on September 11 at age 47 of undisclosed causes.
4	September 11 attacks	1,155,678	The fifteenth anniversary of the world terrorist attack in world history fell this week. It fell on the first day of the week, to that may be it is only #4 this year, as compared to #2 the last two years.
5	Roanoke Colony	870,775	The sixth season of American Horror Story, dubbed American Horror Story: Roanoke 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.
6	Yma Sumac	811,712	Google ran a Doodle on what would have been the 94th birthday of the Peruvian soprano. The Doodle only appeared in the United States and certain South American countries (of course including Peru).
7	Donald Trump	688,121	Press coverage in the United States is at 25% Donald Trump is on every day, it seems. On September 16, Trump promised to give a press conference regarding his current views on birtherism. Starting in 2011, Trump had led the charge into the specious claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. At the press conference, Trump mostly touted his new D.C. hotel (where the event was held) and endorsements from some veterans, and concluded the conference by quickly admitting Obama was born in the United States, and then claiming Hillary Clinton had been the one pushing the rumor, apparently to deflect any implications of his years of obvious and absurd lying about the subject. The press has been highly critical of the event, with CNN anchor Jake Tapper even calling it a "political Rick roll."
8	Edward Snowden	671,125	The film Snowden was released in the United States on September 16.
9	UFC 203	667,115	Stipe Miocic defeated Alistair Overeem is the featured match of this September 10 event held at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.
10	Murder of JonBenét Ramsey	649,805	In addition to the O. J. Simpson murder case, the 1990s also brought us this second over-covered over-sensationalized and exploited murder. A new mini-series on American television 'The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey has brought another round of attention as we approach the 20th anniversary of the girls' death.
11	Deaths in 2016	634,952	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.
12	Backlash (2016)	591,551	A wrestling event held on September 11 in Richmond, Virginia. A.J. Styles (pictured) won the main event.
13	Stranger Things (TV series)	583,194	Down from 846K views last week. This Netflix science-fiction series is basically an 8-hour homage to early 80s kid-centric flicks like E.T., The Goonies and Explorers, though aimed mostly at adults. It has been a smash hit for Netflix, evidenced by its continuing appearance on this chart -- nine straight weeks, though it appears it is finally moving down. Netflix recently ordered a second season.
14	Eid al-Adha	525,082	The Muslim holiday fell on September 12 this year. Similar view count to last year when it got 560K views and placed #12 for the week.
15	American Horror Story (season 6)	520,445	See #5; as of September 15, this is now a redirect to American Horror Story: Roanoke
16	Train to Busan	514,927	This popular South Korean "zombie apocalypse horror film" (according to Wikipedia) starring Jung Yu-mi (pictured) was released in July but saw a wave of popularity this past week.
17	Pillars of Creation	512,603	A popular article on Reddit that hit TIL again.
18	Killing of Harambe	477,461	What began as a heartfelt reaction to what some felt was the unnecessary killing of a silverback western lowland gorilla (pictured, though not him specifically) has morphed over the last three months into online trolling and racist abuse, along with the standard targeted misogyny. What the troll army hopes to accomplish is never clear, but whatever it is it doesn't involve helping gorillas.
19	Stan Wawrinka	466,074	Won the 2016 US Open – Men's Singles.
20	Hillary Clinton	455,324	My advice to Hillary Clinton if she wants to be appear higher in this report is to do lots of crazy stuff and make wild statements in interviews. She might also insult people on Twitter at least daily. But perhaps that is not her goal.
21	Narcos	453,143	The second season of the TV series about the rise of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar (see #1) premiered in its entirety on Netflix on September 2.
22	American Horror Story	429,102	See #5.
23	Sully (film)	396,713	Clint Eastwood's latest cry of despair against our "pussy generation" (his words) is proving less controversial than his last, American Sniper; no doubt thanks to the calming presence of Tom Hanks in the title role of hero pilot Chelsey "Sully" Sullenberger, who safely landed his failing passenger plane in New York's Hudson River. But Eastwood's cinematic take on Sully's story is nonetheless drawing fire for its supposed depiction of NTSB investigators as obstructive bureaucrats who would sell a hero down the river if they could.
24	Richie Ashburn	403,214	Reddit.
25	The Blair Witch Project	396,552	Due to the release of the new movie Blair Witch, the original 1999 brilliant piece of internet hoaxing (but not good movie) makes the chart.

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% or less) or almost all mobile views (~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.

AMGTV 5.71% mobile, but we've been removing this for a few weeks now due to clear non-human influence.
Earth 5.32% mobile, same issue
XXXX 79.31% mobile. This is a disambiguation page, I cannot find a human-based explanation for spike in views.
Pablo Picasso 7.27% mobile, but still strong evidence of non-human views.

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