The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (September 4 to 10, 2016)

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

Plata y mas plata : Wikipedia's viewers seem determined to tune the real world out this week, with pop culture in overwhelming dominance once again. And leading the charge is, of course, Netflix's series Narcos, which was similarly dominant during its first season last year. A close runner up is Clint Eastwood's hero hagiography Sully, which, like his previous American Sniper, came with a spicy touch of controversy to turn eyeballs its way. Even the real world seemed focused on ghosts, since two of the non-media generated entries were both dead icons: Mother Teresa and Steve Irwin. The only genuine bit of real world horror was the troubling early release of Brock Turner, over which many of our users likely felt a very personal fear.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of September 4 to 10, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the newly-revamped WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Pablo Escobar	2,309,885	Narcos is back. And apparently people weren't sufficiently informed about its subject last year, because numbers are up fourfold on last week and he's reclaimed his throne at the top of this chart. A suspiciously high 75% mobile count, but there's no reason for it not to be here.
2	Mother Teresa	1,155,944	The Albanian missionary, who, depending on your point of view, was either the modern paragon of holy virtue or a hideous amalgam of all the faults of organised religion, was canonised this week as Saint Teresa of Calcutta before a crowd of thousands.
3	Ann Coulter	987,975	It must have looked good on paper. Have not-quite-has-been actor Rob Lowe over for a celebrity roast and get professional aggressor Ann Coulter to lead the attack. Unfortunately, after years of bilious vitriol spewed through various media at basically everyone who wasn't her, it seems Ann had reached some kind of critical mass, because the tide of battle turned, and everyone decided to roast her instead.
4	Stranger Things (TV series)	846,657	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 -- eight straight weeks. Netflix recently ordered a second season.
5	Narcos	752,660	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.
6	Harley-Davidson	675,195	The standard toy for middle-aged, middle class white guys to enact their rebellious and countercultural fantasies got a boost this week thanks to Harley and the Davidsons, a three-part drama that aired to middling reviews but stellar ratings, giving the Discovery Channel their best week in years.
7	Deaths in 2016	647,054	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.
8	2016 Summer Paralympics	644,210	The Olympics's less heralded encore got underway this week in Rio de Janeiro. We in the UK are good at Olympic events because we spend lottery money on them, but we've in recent years given special notice to the Paralympics, mainly because we did them so well last time.
9	Rob Lowe	615,920	The former Brat Packer and West Wing star was the intended target of a celebrity roast on Comedy Central this week, but the format eventually collapsed when the team turned on Ann Coulter (see #3)
10	Killing of Harambe	554,465	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.
11	Cali Cartel	499,003	The principal competitors to the Medellin Cartel of Pablo Escobar (see #1), who would eventually control 90 percent of the cocaine market after Escobar's appropriately violent death, were a primary faction in the second season of the Netflix drama Narcos.
12	Chesley Sullenberger	492,492	Sully, 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.
13	Boeing	457,213	As learned in a Reddit thread this week, after Boeing fired 63,000 employees in Seattle, someone erected a billboard requesting that "the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights."
14	Donald Trump	446,865	Much as I would love to blame his presence here on some controversy, truth is this was a relatively quiet week for the Donald, with no obvious spikes in views. He's just... popular.
15	Don't Breathe (2016 film)	438,538	This horror entry, essentially a cross between Wait Until Dark and First Blood, in which, instead of Audrey Hepburn as the blind victim getting her home invaded, it's a crazed vet with supernatural hearing who soon turns the tables on the poor schlubs, opened the prior week to stellar notices and a $26 million opening weekend.
16	Queen Victoria	431,833	The British television show Victoria, starring former Doctor Who companion Jenna Coleman in the title role, drew attention to its subject for a second week.
17	Steve Irwin	548,334	The beloved professional animal traumatiser got a huge spike in coverage in the week of the tenth anniversary of his death at the tail of a peeved stingray.
18	UFC 203	402,286	The mixed martial arts event was held on September 10, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.
19	Sully (film)	396,713	See #12.
20	Suicide Squad (film)	394,712	DC Comics' ramshackle crew of press-ganged supervillains, forced to do the will of a shadowy organization or let their heads explode, are the stars of one of the most anticipated films in the nascent DC Cinematic Universe, which was released on August 5 to generally negative reviews. Nonetheless, it grossed $267 worldwide in its opening weekend.
21	Labor Day	386,010	A recurring annual appearance, though numbers are substantially down from last year. The first Monday in September is the traditional end of the United States summer season, and, for some people, the last time of the year it is in any way excusable to wear white.
22	People v. Turner	382,656	Sometimes, Wikipedians can be downright strange. I'm well aware of the arcane decisions that can lead to bizarre article choices, but I've never seen a notable man's name redirect to his court case before. I've never even seen a court case on this list before. Maybe they felt that the guy didn't deserve his own article. OK, but then did Jeffrey Dahmer? To be sure, this guy was a scumbag, and his early release after being convicted of sexual assault is a shocking indictment of America's treatment of sex crime. But who knows what he may do in future that isn't tied to this case?
23	US Airways Flight 1549	369,477	The flight safely landed in the Hudson by Chelsey "Sully" Sullenberger (see #12)
24	September 11 attacks	366,909	With the fifteenth anniversary falling on the first day of the next week, expect this to be the #1 topic.
25	German tank problem	364,760	This is almost certainly a reddit thread, but reddit threads being the elusive prey that they are, I've had to give up the chase. And I pride myself on my surgical Googling skills.

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.

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