Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (September 14 to 20, 2014)

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

Summary: This could be the beginning of a new era for this list. Until now, decisions to remove suspicious content have been largely educated guesswork. This week though, we have a new collaborator who can shine a light on the origins and patterns, sorting once and for all the webwheat from the cyberchaff. Of course, it also means we will have to start including articles we would have once excluded, regardless of whether we can find a reason or not. So expect a lot more certainty and a lot more bewilderment. Bewilderment pretty much sums up the state of the world right now, as Brtain recovers from its brief flirtation with non-existence, and ISIS continues to provoke the West.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of September 14 to 20, 2014, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Scottish independence referendum, 2014	921,412	Well, the Nationalists' overnight surge, which actually made the dismemberment of Britain seem plausible for a moment and tickled the romantic imaginings of the English-speaking world, turned out to be a ghost, as the Scots ultimately voted as they'd always said they would: a small but decent majority in favour of staying together. Now the only question is where to go from here. Thankfully, we have loads of international crises to distract us from that question.
2	Scotland	585,032	The land of Rabbie Burns and Walter Scott, whisky and haggis, Braveheart and Trainspotting became the focus of the Anglosphere's attention this week, thanks to the whiffs of freedom drifting from a few late polls. No doubt the fact that sizeable populations in Britain's many onetime overseas colonies can trace their ancestry back there played a role as well.
3	Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant	548,101	Numbers are down a bit from last week, but since this week closed before Barack Obama's decision to bomb ISIS bases in Syria without Syria's permission, expect them to skyrocket in the next update.
4	Deaths in 2014	414,034	The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article.
5	Ruin value	408,271	Ruin value, or Ruinenwert, is a term employed by the Nazis, who believed that should be designed so that their ruins would be aesthetically pleasing, as discussed on a Reddit thread this week.
6	United Kingdom	407,637	The nation in which I happen to live managed to escape dissolution this week, but, like a man waking up with a hangover, we have many questions regarding what exactly just happened and what awaits us when we try to get back to normal.
7	Facebook	396,115	A perennially popular article.
8	Theodore Roosevelt	395,077	The first President Roosevelt was one of several members of his family to get noticed this week, thanks to the launch of the latest Ken Burns miniseries, The Roosevelts, on PBS on 14 September.
9	Google	355,244	Always a fairly popular article.
10	Franklin D. Roosevelt	343,715	The longest-serving American president got his dues for the same reason his fourth cousin once removed did (see #8)
11	List of Bollywood films of 2014	337,760	A regular visitor to the Top 25.
12	West Indian cricket team in India in 2014–15	301,912	The India effect strikes again, as Indians seek out the latest info on the current series against the West Indies cricket team.
13	Ariana Grande	300,936	The singer and onetime Nickelodeon actress performed her hit single "Bang Bang" on 19 September at the iHeartRadio Music Awards with her collaborator, Niki Minaj, and also faced a minor controversy after rumours surfaced that she'd claimed she wished her fans would "fucking die"; claims she vehemently denied.
14	2014 in film	300,390	Yearly articles like this become more comprehensive as the year progresses, they can really be quite amazing compilations of information.
15	Wikipedia	284,778	Wikipedia returns to its own top 25.
16	Kevin James	280,663	The former King of Queens star is currently in the middle of a nationwide stand-up tour.
17	Schizophrenia and smoking	274,163	This week Yale researchers found more evidence for a link long suspected: schizophrenics are often heavy smokers, and there is evidence that nicotine aids in blunting their symptoms.
18	Ebola virus disease	263,331	This week an exasperated World Health Organization declared that the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak, already the largest in history by far, was spiralling out of control, and estimates are now suggesting the final death toll could touch the millions.
19	Iggy Azalea	263,331	The Australian pop singer performed at the iHeartRadio Music Festival this week, and is also suing her ex for publishing her old music without her permission.
20	Alibaba Group	259,147	China's answer to Amazon.com and eBay is one of the largest companies on Earth, and finally went public this week, valued at a staggering US$231 billion.
21	Human resources	256,963	I have no idea why this is on here, but it is apparently legitimate.
22	List of Doctor Who serials	256,237	The latest season of the classic British scifi series launched on 23 August with the new Doctor, Peter Capaldi.
23	Destiny (video game)	251,221	This video game was released on September 9, and by the next day publisher Activision claimed that it was the most successful new gaming franchise launch of all time, with more than $500 million USD in sales to retail stores and consumers worldwide.
24	Carrie Buck	249,679	This "feebleminded" woman had a case taken to the US Supreme Court when ordered to undergo forced sterilisation in 1924 in the name of eugenics. Bizarrely, the Court's decision still stands today, as noted in a Reddit thread this week.
25	History of Scotland	238,195	The possibility that Scotland may become an independent nation led to renewed interest in its past this week.

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). There are a number of articles that reappear frequently in the raw top 25 for no determined reason, and have been excluded as likely being due to automated views. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the talk page if you wish.

Alive/Alive!: Links to disambigs with no apparent reason for being.
less (Unix): Massive view spike commenced 9 Sept without explanation.
Online shopping: Massive view spike commenced on 6 Sept without explanation.
Undefined. A common error message in computing, these are automated visits by a buggy computer program.
Ddd: Hello? Spambot here. Just checking in.
Amazon.com. Apparently due to bad caching.
Rock music. Ditto.
English alphabet and Alphabet. No legitimate reason for recent rise in views.
Hollow Body Guitar: The long-unawaited return of a venerable exclusion, capital letters included. How sweet that it still remembers us.
NASA Helios: A single misbehaving user has been flooding this.

Specific exclusions this week

Payday loan: A scammer attempting to bilk the desperate.
Wireless security camera: A relic of bad caching.
20 Fenchurch Street: The result of this blog post getting 322 thousand hits from a single location.
Mali (GPU): Another relic of bad caching.
Warner Robins: A redirect, due to bad caching.