WP:TOP25

Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (September 15 to 21, 2013)

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

Summary: The hubbub over Grand Theft Auto V and the antepenultimate episode of Breaking Bad mingled with more scholastic inquiry this week; the fact that said Breaking Bad episode was named "Ozymandias" led many users to Shelley's poem, while Reddit and Google acquainted readers with the Foucault pendulum and Methuselah, the 2000-year-old Judean date palm brought back from extinction.

For the week of September 15 - 21, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:

Rank	Last	Wks	Article	Class	Views	Notes
1	-	-	Léon Foucault		1,540,620	The surest path to Wikipedia glory is to be memorialised in an interactive Google Doodle. And the guy who proved that the Earth rotated (albeit a few centuries after it was strictly necessary) got one for his 194th birthday on September 18.
2	13	2	Grand Theft Auto V		1,004,366	The sequel to the most critically acclaimed video game of all time (seriously) and arguably the only situation in which someone will cheer you for hijacking and then crashing a jumbo jet full of passengers, just made $1 billion in 3 days. That's a lot of jipped prostitutes.
3	4	7	Breaking Bad		800,124	The final season of this acclaimed chemistry teacher-turned-Scarface TV series began on August 11.
4	2	37	Facebook		689,888	A perennially popular article
5	-	-	Nina Davuluri		572,786	The first Indian American Miss America was the recipient of some singularly opinionated Tweets following her win this week; claiming that she's an immigrant (she's from New York), she's an Arab (she's Telugu) she's a Muslim (she's Hindu), and, oddest of all, that it would matter a whit if she was.
6	6	6	List of Breaking Bad episodes	List	532,082	People will turn to this page to keep up with the show.
7	7	5	Breaking Bad (season 5)	List	515,167	As above, people want to keep up with this show.
8	-	-	Floyd Mayweather, Jr.		416,789	All sports create gods, but, for some reason, none do it like boxing. And the world middleweight champion certainly looks decidedly deific after beating Saul Alvarez on September 14; a fight that an estimated 2.2 million televisions tuned in for, and which could ultimately net him $100 million.
9	-	-	Nothing Was the Same		385,859	The next album from Canadian rapper Drake will be released on September 24.
10	-	-	Volvo YCC	Unassessed	373,177	The concept car designed by women, for women got a Reddit thread on September 18.
11	9	47	Deaths in 2013	List	359,804	The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article.
12	-	-	Oldest viable seed		342,319	The 2,000-year-old date palm, thought extinct in the 2nd century, was successfully germinated from a seed found in a sealed jar in the ruins of the palace of Herod the Great. You couldn't make up a story like that, and Reddit readers certainly took to it.
13	11	35	Google		329,306	A perennially popular article.
14	-	-	Grand Masti		324,404	This Bollywood adult comedy has seen its business slacken in its second week, but still seems on course to crack the ₹1 billion mark.
15	12	18	List of Bollywood films of 2013	List	312,456	An established staple of the top 25.
16	-	-	Ozymandias		308,220	The poem by Percy Shelley shot into the top 25 thanks to being the namesake of a cracking episode of Breaking Bad. How do you get the wired generation interested in a 200-year-old poem? Have Bryan Cranston recite the heck out of it, that's how.
17	-	-	Costa Concordia		297,597	The cruise ship that ran aground 18 months ago at the cost of 32 lives was finally parbuckled upright on September 17. The cost of resurrecting the listing hulk has so far risen to $800 million. It's expected to be taken in for breaking in early 2014.
18	14	2	Wikipedia		295,425	Wikipedia's presence in its own top 25 appears to due to genuine interest. Perhaps we should expect it to take up permanent residence in future.
19	-	-	Foucault pendulum		293,719	The pendulum that swings as the world turns beneath it got a surge of interest thanks to the Google Doodle for its namesake (see #1)
20	5	3	Miley Cyrus		288,100	Well, she twerked herself into her coming of age, graduated into adulthood by riding nude on a wrecking ball while licking a sledgehammer, and then finally reached maturity by splitting with her movie star boyfriend. Any attempt to top this will have to involve shaving her head or shoplifting.
21	17	7	IPv6		283,425	This issue has reappeared in the top 25, after hovering below it for some time. It is something of a crisis, though not one that is necessarily apparent. It may come as a surprise to some, but the Internet is, for lack of a better word, full. Every computer online is assigned a specific address, made up of a sequence of numbers, that allows other computers to contact it over the Internet. The original number sequence, known as IPv4, is currently the norm for ~99% of online computers. It allows for a maximum of about 4.3 billion addresses; a number that maxed out in January 2011. The long-term plan is to migrate over to IPv6, which allows for 3x10³⁸ addresses; however, since this would require a massive software and even hardware upgrade, many companies are reluctant to undertake it. Until now we've been stalling for time by harvesting abandoned addresses and re-allocating them, a decidedly short-term measure.
22	-	-	Mid-Autumn Festival		278,193	The Chinese holiday got a Google Doodle on September 19.
23	-	40	World War II		276,395	Another perennially popular article. (The 16th most popular article from 2010–12, in fact, see Table 2 here.)
24	-	-	M. S. Subbulakshmi		275,371	The renowned Carnatic singer got a Google Doodle on what would have been her 97th birthday on 16 September.
25	3	6	Twerking		274,779	The new term for waggling your bottom onstage continues to be a point of interest.

Almosts:

Under the Dome (TV series) (273,902 views); YouTube (261,932 views); Costa Concordia disaster (259,465 views)

Exclusions:

This list excludes the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages, and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Please keep in mind that the explanations given for these articles' popularity are, fundamentally, guesses. Just because a plausible reason is found for a view spike, that doesn't mean it wasn't due to a bot.

There are a number of articles that reappear frequently in the 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.
- G: This, or alternately G-force, frequently appears in the top 25. It is probably due to people typing "G" for "Google" in Google Chrome's search bar and hastily clicking "enter".
- Alive/Alive!: Links to disambigs with no apparent reason for being.
- Lycos: the geriatric web portal seems to be back en vogue, for no apparent reason.

Notes:

Number of views needed to reach Top 25 this week: 274,779. Last week: 235,621

The revision of WP:5000 containing the data used to create this list.