Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (April 13 to 19, 2014)
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Summary: If I were the kind of person who made snap judgments based on flimsy evidence, I'd say our readership is in a funk. Compare this week's Easter queries to last year's; they're down by 50%. Also, compare this week's "Purple Wedding" on Game of Thrones, which saw the death by poisoning of that loathsome sprog Joffrey Baratheon, to last year's "Red Wedding", down by ≈40%. It's a recurring trend; the Golden Globes, the Oscars and several other annual events are noticeably lower in the rankings from last year. Are people just not able to summon the necessary enthusiasm? Although the barrage of worrisome news appears to have faded from the list this week, perhaps its cumulative weariness has had an impact. The high position for anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, a topic of interest mainly to British readers and so not usually likely to reach the top 25, shows that our readers are in a mood of sombre reflection. One counter-trend to the overall slump is Reddit, which has seen seven topics in the last two weeks.
For the week of April 13 to 19, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:
Rank Last Wks Article Class Views Image Notes 1 4 25 Game of Thrones 
775,534 
Well, it took a week, but Game of Thrones is back on top. Could it have something to do with a certain homicidal brat getting his long overdue comeuppance? 2 – 2 Good Friday 
607,170 
It's Easter week this week, and it seems people were more drawn to its dark side this year, the day that commemorates ("celebrates" isn't really the word) the torture and crucifixion (Passion) of Jesus Christ, as opposed to Easter Sunday (below) which celebrates his resurrection. 3 - - Hillsborough disaster
551,667 
The worst football disaster in British history, in which a human crush led to the death of 96 spectators and the injury of nearly 800 more, got some often vociferous attention during the week of its 25th anniversary on 15 April, with some questioning whether the steps taken to prevent its recurrence have inflicted more harm than intended. 4 – 2 Easter
549,027 
It's hard to remember these days, under the onslaught of bunnies, chocolate eggs and marshmallow peeps, that Easter, not Christmas, is the most sacred date of the Christian calendar. Doubtless a lot of people learned that this week, along with some fairly eye-raising information about the events it actually celebrates. 5 - - Bubba Watson
496,963 
One of the few professional southpaw golfers, Watson won his second Masters Tournament this week. 6 11 3 Game of Thrones (season 4)
477,676 As usual, people will be using this page to look up air dates. 7 - - Heartbleed 
444,564 
Despite its virus-y name, this isn't a virus; it is a security bug in the "heartbeat" (basically a repeated "Is All Well?" signal) in the OpenSSL program, which is widely used to provide security for internet sites. It is estimated to have affected 17 percent of all sites using the program, which spooked Netizens en masse this week as they rushed to change their potentially compromised passwords. 8 14 2 List of Game of Thrones episodes 
433,201 Most likely air dates again. 9 - - Göbekli Tepe
423,487 
Southeastern Turkey is home to some of the earliest known urban settlements in the world; so old we don't have names for the people who built them. The Göbekli Tepe site features ritualistic structures that may be as much as 12,000 years old, as pointed out in a thread on Reddit this week. 10 16 11 Amazon.com
419,848 
This article has been veering wildly (and suspiciously) around the view graph for several weeks, but at least now its presence on the list has a reason: Amazon Fire TV, announced this week, is a digital streaming device to watch online content on a HDTV. How it distinguishes itself from the three or four other such devices currently on the market is a matter of some dispute. 11 13 56 Deaths in 2014
406,810 
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. 12 – 2 Passover
510,259 
The Jewish holiday to which Easter is indelibly linked, which celebrates far older (and in many ways far grimmer) events. 13 - - Gabriel García Márquez 
385,230 
The Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, who introduced magic realism to the wider world, died this week at the age of 87, receiving eulogies from across the globe. 14 - 3 A Song of Ice and Fire
351,055 
George R. R. Martin's still unfinished (hint hint, George) tale of dynastic struggle in a fantasy world has reappeared in the top 25 in the wake the current fourth season of its TV adaptation, Game of Thrones. 15 - - The Amazing Spider-Man 2
331,947 
It's not surprising that this was released in foreign markets before its home territory; the original Spider-Man made $822 million worldwide, with the domestic and international grosses split roughly 50/50. The rebooted Amazing Spider-Man (this film's predecessor) made $752 million worldwide, but with international grosses now comprising 2/3 the total. This radical shift in Hollywood's biosphere has taken place in just a decade, and it is already altering hunting strategies, for good or ill; even after just one week in a few small territories, this movie has already made $47 million. 16 21 66 Facebook
327,033 
A perennially popular article. 17 17 7 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
323,939 
Joss Whedon's extension of the Marvel Cinematic Universe into television returned on 1 April after a three-week hiatus. 18 - - April 2014 lunar eclipse
303,028 
Lunar eclipses are not uncommon (there will be three more before the end of next year) but the fact that for this one totality was visible from the United States probably accounts for its added Wiki-popularity. 19 24 18 Frozen (2013 film)
299,268 
Disney's Oscar-winning juggernaut got a shot in the arm thanks to its release on DVD on March 18. Despite this, it has already overtaken Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest as Disney's highest-grossing film in theatres. 20 - - Lunar eclipse
288,787 See above 21 - - Hugh Laurie
287,724 
I don't normally go for one-day spikes, but this one had a (very small) additional bump and happened to coincide with the onetime Blackadder star and erstwhile Doctor House's debut bluesman concert in New Zealand. 22 – 2 Maundy Thursday
277,669 
The celebration of the last day before Christ's crucifixion, the Last Supper and the washing of feet (the word comes from Mandatum or commandment) formed the final part of this week's Easter quartet. 23 - - Neanderthal
277,368 The other sapient hominid with whom we coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years became a topic of interest on Reddit this week, largely thanks to recent evidence that the genes of everyone outside of Africa suggest we may have done more that merely coexist. 24 - - Nanking Massacre
277,266 
This massacre conducted by Japanese troops during their invasion of China in 1937 is also known as the "Rape of Nanking". That isn't a metaphor; up to 20,000 women were raped, and often subsequently murdered or brutally mutilated, as discussed on a Reddit thread this week. 25 - - Pharrell Williams
275,436 
The seven-time Grammy winner got into the news this week thanks to a YouTube video of British Muslims dancing to his hit Motown riff "Happy". The video has topped 1.2 million views and has spawned copies across the world. Despite overwhelmingly positive reaction, certain killjoys in the Islamic community still felt the need to declare the video haram, or blasphemous, presumably because it showed people being happy.
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- Number of views needed to reach Top 25 this week: 275,436. Last week: 284,259.
- The revision of WP:5000 containing the data used to create this list.
- Almosts: YouTube (270,045 views); Fargo (TV series) (269,605 views); List of Bollywood films of 2014 (268,434 views)
Exclusions
edit- This list excludes the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), 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 I can't find a reason for an article to be included doesn't mean there isn't one; conversely, 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.
- Java/JOP: Since both of these articles are tied (verbally at least) to the programming language, it seems likely that this is a bot searching for that.
- Climatic Research Unit email controversy: I'll believe that Climategate was #1 during a typhoon, but that it got more hits than Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving? No.
- IPv6: I have to face facts; I allowed this into the top 25 for months as it is the kind of issue that would appeal to web denizens (ala Bitcoin) but its insane popularity is just too high explain by human interest alone. It's getting help.
- Ddd: Hello? Spambot here. Just checking in.
- History of Bălţi: There is simply no logical way to explain the sudden rise of this hyper-obscure article except as the result of a traffic-checking botnet, à la cat anatomy
- Alive/Alive!: Links to disambigs with no apparent reason for being.
- Specific exclusions this week:
- Off-the-Record Messaging: Obscure technical topics frequently suddenly rocket to the top briefly for no apparent reason, only to just as suddenly disappear, never being seen again
- Lexus LFA: suspicious one-day spike.