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Traffic report

Dead Black Men and Science Fiction

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By Milowent

Dead black men and science-fiction are the stark contrasts which fill the Traffic Report this week. The grand jury decision not to indict after the death of Eric Garner (#1) recently followed a similar decision in the shooting of Michael Brown (#5), and remain top news stories in the United States. A future movie based on the Suicide Squad (#2) comics, the future Star Wars: The Force Awakens (#6), and current Interstellar (#7), not to mention the continuing popularity of the science-but-not-fiction Stephen Hawking (#4) represent the bulk of the Top 10. And in the greater Top 25 we see Terminator Genisys at #18, The Maze Runner at #22, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 at #24, and the non-fictional spacecraft Orion at #25. On the whole, escapism dominates over reality for another week.

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.

For the week of 30 November to 6 December 2014, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Death of Eric Garner C-class 1,328,750
On 3 December, a grand jury decided not to indict New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in connection with the death of Eric Garner, who died in Tompkinsville, Staten Island on 19 July after being put in a chokehold. A video of the event went viral shortly after that event. The grand jury's decision has caused public outcry, and the U.S. Justice Department has announced a separate civil rights investigation into Garner's death. Between this and the Shooting of Michael Brown (#1 last week, #5 this week), police procedure in the United States (especially black citizens) has become a subject of widespread discussion.
2 Suicide Squad C-class 727,440
The cast of the upcoming 2016 film of the same name about this comics franchise was announced this week, including Will Smith as Deadshot, Jared Leto as the Joker, Margot Robbie (pictured) as Harley Quinn, Tom Hardy as Rick Flag, Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang, and Cara Delevingne, who is currently filming Paper Towns, as Enchantress.
3 Facebook B-class 724,670
A perennially popular article, and a jump from 611,598 views last week puts it at #3 this week, its highest placing since it also hit #3 the week of November 2 to 8. To find a week where Facebook doesn't appear on the Top 25, you have to go all the way back to the week of June 15 to 21, when the World Cup was dominating the chart.
4 Stephen Hawking B-Class 704,737
The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon got a boost with the release of the biopic, The Theory of Everything, in the United States on 7 November. His article has remained popular since, this being his fifth straight weekly appearance.
5 Shooting of Michael Brown C-class 611,311
The 24 November decision by the grand jury not to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager from Ferguson, Missouri, led not only to further unrest but to Brown's death becoming the most sought-after topic on Wikipedia last week. This week the article dropped from 2.5 million views to just over 600 thousand.
6 Star Wars: The Force Awakens C-class 610,664
After the mess George Lucas made of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, it's fair to say fans are more than a little equivocal about whatever new owners Disney and admitted Star Wars geek J. J. Abrams have planned to restore the series' reputation. Though many feel the film's title itself is far from promising and alternate humorous titles have abounded, hope springs eternal and this article remains popular.
7 Interstellar (film) B-class 606,266
As the above interest in Stephen Hawking shows, movies that win at the box office are seldom the ones that get the most Wikipedia views; rather it is the amount of debate and discussion those movies trigger that seems to be the main driver of Wikipedia interest. Case in point: Interstellar's respectable $147 million domestic box office has paled next to that of Big Hero 6, which opened opposite it, and even The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, which opened two weeks after it. And yet, the debates and questions it raised, both scientific and over its own quality, have meant that this film's article has remained in the top 10 for weeks.
8 Phillip Hughes C-Class 593,302
One of the best cricketers in Australia's modern history, at the age of 20, Phillip Hughes scored centuries in both innings at a test match, the youngest player ever to do so. Sadly, he died last week after being hit on the neck by a cricket ball.
9 The Walking Dead (TV series) Good Article 545,851
The show's fifth season premièred on 12 October, and the series article has remained popular since that time.
10 Deaths in 2014 List 491,209
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. Deaths this week included Bangladeshi painter Qayyum Chowdhury (November 30) (pictured), Greek-American epidemiologist and oncologist Dimitrios Trichopoulos (December 1); British wheelchair basketball player Josie Cichockyj (December 2); Mexican Supreme Court Justice Sergio Armando Valls (December 3); American songwriter Bob Montgomery (December 4); American photographer Arthur Leipzig (December 5); and Ralph H. Baer, often called "the father of videogames" (December 6)
  • Notes from the Top 5000: 80 articles from the raw Top 5000 exceeded over 250,000 views this week, the last being Chernobyl disaster (#80, 250,954 views); 476 articles cracked 100,000 views, ending with Colombian house music DJ Lupe Fuentes (#476, 100,259 views); Recent American Dancing with the Stars winner Alfonso Ribeiro (#1750) was last to top 50,000 as he slides out of the limelight again; and there was a three-way tie for last place (#4998) with Ancient Rome, Mississippi River, and Shirley Bassey each with 27,377 views. The average article in the Top 5000 this week had 41.7% mobile views.
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  • Must the Signpost continue to use this section to push POVs? "The mess George Lucas made of the prequels"... Not that I entirely disagree, but we should be more professional than that. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:13, 13 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • That the Signpost has a point of view comes as a surprise to me, given the ever-changing group of people who write its content, and the inability of the editor-in-chief to impose any central point of view. More relevantly, the Signpost desperately needs writers. Objecting to what is simply one person's opinion (about the merits of a film director!), on a page where it's clear that the opinion is of a single person, seems to me to increase the likelihood that the Signpost will have even fewer writers in the future.
    • So: I applaud Milowent for his/her work here, and I (for one) fully support personal opinions being expressed here (with the standard caveats about sexism, racism, etc.) Rock on! -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:42, 13 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • The objective data is made more interesting through the addition of some opinion. I don't see it as a problem, but consider this as a regular opinion column in the Signpost and just enjoy reading it. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 17:57, 13 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
      • Then it should be labeled as an opinion column. When I wrote the FC section, I did my best to avoid showing a POV even on subjects which I found thoroughly distasteful. For interest pieces, I interviewed FC makers and allowed them to present their own experiences. This is not the gaming press, where any article without POV is not published. This is the press for a community of encyclopedia writers, and should thus be a bit more mature. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 12:24, 14 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • So Milowent called he Star Wars prequels crap. How does harm anything? I seriously doubt anyone with an IQ above room temperature would cite this Signpost article as proof that those movies were crap, let alone that Wikipedia said they were crap -- unless this hypothetical person wanted to make some point dishonestly. -- llywrch (talk) 00:42, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for the commentary and support. The data is the data, but the notes are commentary; in formulating how these charts would look I considered the work of prior chroniclers of popular culture such as James D. Hart who wrote The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (1950) and Gerald Bordman's works on American theatre. That "unworthy" material is often popular is worth noting. Interestingly, the "mess" comment is a carryover from Serendipodous' report last week, though I also agreed with it, and no one commented on it. Commentary on the opinions expressed is always welcome and, to my mind, should this data be available to researchers in 100 years, they might actually find the lists and commentary useful. I didn't expect commentary on the Star Wars aside; I thought my choice of title "Dead Black Men ..." was perhaps very slightly provocative but I thought it the best way to really capture what was happening in terms of article popularity that week.--Milowent • hasspoken 14:13, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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