Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (January 19 to 25, 2014)
edit← Last week's report – Next week's Report →
Summary: There are times when this job is hard. As an analogy, imagine navigating in fog at night, except you don't know where you are, you don't know where you want to go, and your flashlight keeps dying on you. Wikipedia, who apparently alone among internet sites actually value their users' privacy, have left me with precious few tools to find my way (Bounce rate and HTTP referers would be nice guys, if you're reading) and so there are times when I simply cannot determine why something is or is not on the list. The hour-by-hour viewing tool that I made such a fuss about two weeks ago, and which would at least have suggested which spikes were natural, is now down, which means I'm back to erring on the side of exclusion. This week sees six excluded pages on this list (or, more accurately, not on it), which means fully a quarter of the articles on the top 25 have been removed. So I am asking, does anyone know of a way to track down these occasional one-day spikes if they don't appear on Reddit or a Google Doodle? And Wikipedia, why do you outsource important information like view counts to volunteer servers liable to crash or lose functionality?
For the week of January 19-25, 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 2 4 Jordan Belfort 
799,325 Onetime stockbroker who spent 22 months in prison for running a penny stock boiler room, he went on to write the books that the film The Wolf of Wall Street is based on. Yes, he did actually call himself "The Wolf of Wall Street". 2 - - Juan Mata
647,317 
Spanish footballer who was transferred this week from Chelsea F. C. to Manchester United for a club record sum of £37.1 million ($61.4 million) 3 - - Richard Sherman (American football) 
638,607 
The first of several pages related to Super Bowl XLVIII, this guy arguably came top of that list due to his combative talking style, which got him some bad press after taunting Colin Kaepernick (see below) after beating the San Francisco 49ers to reach the Super Bowl. 4 - - Martin Luther King, Jr. 
607,434 
With his birthday a federal holiday, it's not surprising that he makes an annual appearance on this list. 5 6 5 The Wolf of Wall Street (2013 film)
587,561 Martin Scorsese's acclaimed account of one person's contribution to our general economic misery opened to a respectable $34 million on Christmas Day, and has now made over $220 million worldwide 6 - - Justin Bieber 
554,032 
Why is he on this list? Could it be his various indiscretions in Latin America? The lawsuit he was saddled with after egging a neighbour's house? Or, perhaps, his arrest after drag racing a Lamborghini drunk on a beach in Florida? Truth be told it's probably that. 7 4 55 Facebook
513,840 
A perennially popular article 8 3 4 Sherlock (TV series)
434,520 
The contemporary-set revamp of the Sherlock Holmes mythos has become a surprise global hit (and turned its star, Benedict Cumberbatch into an international sex symbol) and is now watched in 200 countries and territories (out of 254), so it's not surprising that its much ballyhooed return from a two-year hiatus was met with feverish anticipation. 9 11 7 Frozen (2013 film)
405,400 Disney's de facto sequel to Tangled has become something of a sensation. It reclaimed the top spot in the US charts on its sixth weekend (a feat only matched by Avatar and Titanic) and has already outgrossed its predecessor both domestically and worldwide, with a total of nearly $820 million. It won a Golden Globe for Animated Feature and seems a shoo-in for the Oscar. 10 14 64 Deaths in 2014 List 397,831 
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. 11 10 18 United States
394,256 
The 8th most popular article of 2013 and the 3rd most popular Wikipedia article between 2010 and 2012. Even when not on the list, this article is a perpetual bubble-under-er. Not really surprising that the country with by far the most English speakers would be the most popular on the English Wikipedia. 12 - - Peyton Manning
372,935 
Starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos who capped a record-breaking year by taking his team to the Super Bowl. 13 - - Bobbi Eden
352,960 
Dutch porn star who garnered a Reddit thread thanks to her promise to fellate every one of her Twitter followers if the Dutch national football team won the 2010 FIFA World Cup. They didn't. 14 - - Colin Kaepernick
339,072 
The San Francisco 49er gained attention as the subject of Richard Sherman's ire (see above) 15 22 12 India 
330,779 
The second-largest English-speaking population on Earth is a regular visitor to the top 25. 16 - - Jai Ho (film)
328,917 Despite massive pre-release hype for this Salman Khan vehicle, it has so far not managed to scale the heights of other recent Bollywood offerings, such as Dhoom 3. 17 - - Flowers in the Attic
319,550 A TV movie adaptation of this once-controversial V. C. Andrews novel aired on 18 January. 18 22 24 IPv6
317,231 
This was one of the most-viewed articles of 2013, and there remains a certain suspicion that, like many articles on technical subjects, it may be over-inflated. However, it is important enough to be given the benefit of the doubt. 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. 19 - - True Detective (TV series) 
284,821 This HBO police procedural stars Woody Harrelson and actor-of-the-moment Matthew McConaughey 20 - - List of Super Bowl champions List 281,062 The impending arrival of Super Bowl XLVIII drew viewers' attention to winners past. 21 - 7 Wikipedia
273,718 
Wikipedia makes a rare appearance in its own Top 25, probably aided by the large number of exclusions this week. 22 14 9 Jennifer Lawrence
267,184 
Wikipedia's favourite actress needs little excuse to reenter the top 25, though a second consecutive Golden Globe win, this time for American Hustle, is a pretty good one. 23 - - 2014 Winter Olympics
266,602 
Thanks to Russia's vicious anti-gay laws and roundly condemned political imprisonments, this upcoming sports event has become, whether it wanted to or not, a lightning rod for modern civil rights protest. 24 - - Metric system
262,842 
With the United States now the only country on Earth apart from Burma never to have gone metric, its presence on the largely American-dominated Wikipedia seems odd; however, a Reddit thread about a millions-strong petition in 1927 urging the US Congress to go metric sparked a lengthy and surprisingly pro-metric conversation. 25 - - Super Bowl XLVIII Unassessed 262,551 
And so the great American event rounds out the list, for obvious reasons.
- Number of views needed to reach Top 25 this week: 262,551. Last week: 308,364.
- The revision of WP:5000 containing the data used to create this list.
- Almosts: Bitcoin (261,748 views); Breaking Bad (255,942 views); Roger Federer (254,091 views)
Exclusions
edit- 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 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.
- Lycos: the geriatric web portal seems to be back en vogue, for no apparent reason.
- Java: My only guess is a bot searching for the programming language.
- Several articles related to global warming (including global warming) have been removed from this list; their continued high view counts are raising suspicions of artificial inflation. I'll believe that Climategate was #1 during a typhoon, but that it got more hits than Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving? No.
- Meat/Vegetarian cuisine: another mysterious reappearance, most likely due to bots.
- Pornography: It could be Wikipedia users returning to their old ways, but I'd rather nip this in the bud before it becomes the next Climatic Research Unit email controversy.
- XXX (film): this decade-old Vin Diesel movie frequently appears in the top 25; given the popularity of articles like XXX, XXXX and .xxx, it has been suggested that this may be due to people Googling "XXX film" and not getting exactly what they expected.
- Specific exclusions this week:
- Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier: artificial-looking one-day spike on the 19th. Possibly connected to the Chinese military commissioning their own carrier fleet, which before had relied on imported Kuznetsovs.
- Sugarloaf Key bat tower: link to a redirect. Presumably ideal Reddit fodder.
- Lucy Hale: Sudden, one-day spike on 21 January, the same day her show Pretty Little Liars aired, so case closed? Well, no. It was a single spike with no tail off, and besides, the show also aired on 14 and 7 Jan, and no spikes there.
- Barrie (electoral district): I can't even begin to understand this one.
- Leviathan (roller coaster): Tallest roller coaster in Canada. Ergo, another article you'd expect to be Reddit thread, but apparently not.
- Health in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: One-day spike with no tailoff and no Reddit traffic.
- Someone seems determined to inflate the views of every article called Rick Jones, or Ricky Jones, or any variation thereof. Perhaps someone named Rick Jones?