The Top 25 Report
Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (November 1 to 7, 2015)
edit← Last week's report – Next week's report →
Doodles of popularity: The power of a Google Doodle to drive traffic to a Wikipedia article is well known. But this week Google really flexed its muscle, cementing three of the top five spots. The chart is topped by George Boole, the inventor of Boolean logic, celebrated by a Doodle on his 200th birthday. And saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax hit #4 with a Doodle on his 201st birthday. (Though their fields were very different, I wonder if Boole and Sax could have ever met?) And coming in at #2 is Day of the Dead, which is primarily a Mexican holiday but has been featured by a Google Doogle displayed in Mexico and the United States (which has a substantial population of Mexican origin) for the past two years. But even when Google only ran its Day of the Dead Doodle in Mexico in 2013, it still hit #4 on this chart, making it difficult to say just how much Google is influencing its traffic.
Outside the top five, we see the annual return of Guy Fawkes (#8) and his night (#11), and the normal mix of pop culture and entertainment topics of the day, from varied niches including country music fans with male vocalist of the year Chris Stapleton (#6) and English football with a BBC documentary raising Salford City F.C. to #13.
As prepared by Milowent, for the week of November 1 to 7, 2015, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 George Boole 
1,462,428 
The inventor of Boolean logic was celebrated by a Google Doodle on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his birth. Boole's work is credited for laying the foundations for the information age. If you're American and missed this Doodle, it is because a Day of the Dead (#2) doodle was used in the United States and Mexico, while Boole was available everywhere else. This makes it even a bit more impressive that this doodle came in at #1 this week, a feat which last happened in late August when surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku topped the chart. 2 Day of the Dead
1,109,918 
Mexico's carnival of the cadaverous is the living dream of any kid who ever wished Halloween could last three days. Up from #9 last week, and probably helped by a Google Doodle which was used in the United States and Mexico. This event also hit #2 last year, and #4 in 2013. Perhaps the jump between 2013 and 2014 is explained in part by the fact that although Google also ran Doodles in those years, it was limited to Mexico only in 2013. Google has run a Day of the Dead Doodle every year since 2008. 3 Spectre (2015 film) 
1,069,633 
Holding steady at #3 for a second week, but a 35% jump in views. The British are not known as titans of the filmmaking world, but they have staked their claim with this latest in their defining James Bond series. The budget, topping $300 million, makes this the most expensive film ever made without the words "Pirates of the Caribbean" in front of it. After the last Bond film made over a billion dollars, it seems the proudly British producers have confidence enough to stand apart from Hollywood, releasing the film in six national territories- but not the US. The strategy has worked; the film has made almost $300 million so far (as of November 8th). 4 Adolphe Sax
1,019,466 
Google's nefarious quest to educate the human race continues, as a worldwide Doodle on November 6 commemorated the 201st anniversary of the birth Adolphe Sax, who invented the saxophone in 1846. How many times have you looked upon a saxophone, or even considered the heyday of 1980s rock music saxophone solos, without wondering how or why that instrument got its name? 5 Halloween
731,914 
On its way back down after peaking at #1 last week. 6 Chris Stapleton
696,463 
Views peaked on November 5, after the country and bluegrass music singer won the "male vocalist of the year" award at the 2015 Country Music Association Awards. The highlight of the night was when Justin Timberlake joined him on stage to sing his version of the song popularized as a George Jones live show staple, "Tennessee Whiskey", and Timberlake's "Drink You Away". 7 Ben Carson 
584,606 
The soft-spoken neurosurgeon and U.S. Republican Presidential candidate has risen to the top of a number of national polls, and thus inviting more attention and scrutiny. The scrutiny includes many press articles dragging up silly things Carson has said, such as stating in 1998 (and confirming last week) that he believes the Pyramids were built by the Biblical Joseph and used to store grain. And on November 6, Politico broke a story that Carson had never been offered a scholarship to the United States Military Academy (West Point), despite stating in his biography and elsewhere that he had. This appears to be more puffery than an outright lie, assuming he was informally told he could get a scholarship which is what he now maintains, not that it matters in the rough and tumble world of politics. 8 Guy Fawkes 
573,619 
Down about 100,000 views from last year's appearance. In the week of Fawke's eponymous night, which came in at #11, interest usually also spikes in the man himself. Whereupon our readers can learn that the only reason he's been vilified as a master criminal for the last 400 years is because he was the only one of his terror cell who was stupid enough to get caught. 9 Deaths in 2015 
557,741 
The viewing figures for this article have been remarkably constant; fluctuating week to week between 450 and 550 thousand on average, apparently heedless of who actually died. Deaths this week (random selections) included Army General Abdikarim Yusuf Adam of Somalia, who was shot (November 1); Japanese actress Haruko Kato (November 2); Colombian actress Adriana Campos (November 3); Finnish sculptor Laila Pullinen (November 4); Russian media executive Mikhail Lesin, who helped found Russia Today (November 5); English football player and manager Bobby Campbell (November 6); and former President of Israel Yitzhak Navon (November 7) 10 Bob Ross
393,217 
Up from #17 and 393K views last week. Until last week, Twitch.tv was mostly noted as a means for psychopathic tweens to swat hapless gamers. But now, with the launch of the new stream "Twitch Creative", the jaded generation is being introduced to one of my childhood's most serene influences: art instructor Bob Ross, who, in his lilting whisper, urged my parents to paint "happy little trees". A stream of Ross's program aired on Twitch, leading to typically polarised reactions from a perplexed wired community, most of whom have never heard of him. If you do click on this article, I encourage you see the chart which painstakingly tracked the elements which Ross used in every painting he ever did -- trees do dominate the list. 11 Guy Fawkes Night
528,210 
Falls annually on November 5, see also #8. 12 Fred Thompson
522,978 
The most-viewed death of the week, Thompson was a prominent American politician and actor, serving in the United States Senate from 1994-2003, and playing the Manhattan District Attorney in the television Law & Order. An ill-fated Presidential campaign in 2008 was a low-point in his unusual career. As a young attorney he also worked for the Republican party during the Watergate scandal, leading questioning which led to the public disclosure of President Nixon's audio recordings. 13 Salford City F.C.
505,298 
England is the land of innumerable footballs teams, most of whom are entirely unknown outside England or even their local regions, though your American editor this week claims to fancy AFC Wimbledon. So, although Salford F.C. are only a seventh-level semi-pro English football club, playing in the Northern Premier League Premier Division, they were recently featured in the BBC documentary Class of '92: Out of Their League. But that title, and the reason for the show, comes from the fact that the team was taken over in 2014 by a group of five former Manchester United stars. 14 Adele
485,124 
Down from #4 last week, and almost 300,000 fewer views. The popular singer's new album 25 will be released on November 20. The first single, "Hello", debuted on October 23. As of this writing, the video for "Hello" already has nearly 300 million views. 15 Pablo Escobar
424,476 
Fascination with the Netflix series Narcos continues to keep the Capone of cocaine on the Top 25. 16 Gwen Stefani
402,143 
On November 4, this American pop singer and current judge on the American version of The Voice announced that she is dating country music star and fellow judge Blake Shelton. 17 The Walking Dead (TV series) 
389,471 
Though down about 160,000 views from last week, likely retains it spot on the list thanks to the shock death of a major character which took the Internet by storm. 18 The Walking Dead (season 6)
387,364 See #17. 19 American Horror Story: Hotel
367,893 
The fifth season of American Horror Story premiered on October 7. 20 H. H. Holmes
367,721 
Holmes is considered one of the first modern serial killers. Reddit likes grisly details, however, and learned that Holmes "opened a hotel which he had designed and built for himself specifically with murder in mind. It included soundproofed bedrooms, trap doors, walls lined with blowtorches and two incinerators." I figured this was a Reddit thread-fueled entry as soon as I saw the subject was a serial killer, and promptly found the thread. But I also found numerous prior threads on the same basic claim, but none of those had become nearly as popular as this one (4,805 upvotes as of this writing). 21 Rod Serling
363,696 
Another Reddit TIL entry: "TIL that Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, was so talkative that on a two hour car ride the rest of his family remained silent to see if Rod would notice their lack of participation. He did not, talking nonstop through the entire car ride." 22 List of Bollywood films of 2015
363,517 
Not an unusual visitor to the Top 25. New releases in the past weekend included the non-blockbusters Yaara Silly Silly, Charlie Kay Chakkar Mein, and Four Pillars of Basement 23 Call of Duty: Black Ops III
360,822 
This military science-fiction first-person shooter videogame, the twelfth Call of Duty game, was released on November 6. It has received generally positive reviews. 24 Star Wars: The Force Awakens
360,350 
If you've caught the press coverage about this upcoming movie here and there, you may be asking yourself, is this thing ever coming out? A poster and new trailer was released a few weeks ago. For those us not that closely involved, the answer is that it rolls out in parts of Europe on December 16, the U.K. on December 17, and North America on December 18. 25 Daniel Craig
363,696 
The Bond of #3.
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). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we also exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (~2% 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. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the talk page if you wish.
- Black hole (908,683) - Views for this article continue to be extremely high without explanation. Though we cannot prove that non-human views are driving traffic, there is no human-based explanation for the sudden large and continued jump in traffic for this article. Editing frequency has also not changed since before the spike. The moving of this page down into exclusions doesn't mean it no longer exists, just that we've concluded it is not, more likely than not, among the Top 25 most popular articles viewed in the past week by actual humans.
- Note: If you came here from the Signpost article, please take any discussion of exclusions to this article's talk page.