Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (August 23 to 29, 2015)
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Summary: With six slots, the film Straight Outta Compton continued to be the main cultural touchstone this week. The number one film at the US box office for the third week running appears to be everyone's number one topic of conversation. However, the dominance was broken up by the welcome return of Google Doodles, which took two slots this week, including number one for the first time since 10 May. Television and sport filled out the rest, with new series like Fear The Walking Dead and Narcos competing with returnees like Teen Wolf and Mr. Robot, while the conclusion of the 2015 World Championships in Athletics led in to the commencement of the group stage of the Champions League.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of August 23 to 29, 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 Duke Kahanamoku 
1,445,269 
Google Doodles don't lead to number 1 articles as often as they used to, so when they do, you can bet it will be someone special. This Olympic champion swimmer, who was born into the Kingdom of Hawaii but lived well into his homeland's statehood, is widely regarded as the St Paul of surfing, as his travels and swimming exhibitions during the 1910s are widely credited with evangelising the formerly uniquely Hawaiian sport across the globe. 2 SummerSlam (2015)
950,916 
WWE's latest pay-per-view pantomime, which took place on August 23, 2015, at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, has been hovering on this list's margins for weeks now, so it's not surprising to see it so high this week. 3 Ashley Madison
898,250 
Well, they said they were going to do it, and they did. "The Impact Team", a group of hackers of definite if somewhat ill-conceived moral purpose, became so incensed with the cheating date site's misleading of their supposedly 33 million-strong clientèle (in fact, only 1 in 3000 of their female accounts are real) that they threatened to publish the details of said clientèle online and ruin their lives. Once again guys, your _targets are decent but your methods need work. Anyway, the company didn't back down, and now those names are on the Internet for all to see. Result? Several broken marriages, at least two suicides, and the embarrassment of several high-profile individuals, including, in a delicious bit of irony, the CEO of Ashley Madison, who resigned from the company. The reported $750 million in threatened lawsuits couldn't have helped either. 4 Eazy-E 
816,719 
The founding member of N.W.A, whose death from AIDS at the age of just 31 forms the emotional climax of the film Straight Outta Compton falls from #1 last week. 5 Until Dawn
795,831 
The year's first "big" video game, this "interactive horror film" has been getting positive reactions from critics and the public; it seems the never-really-liked genre of interactive movies may finally have found a plotline that works. 6 Donald Trump 
728,358 
Nothing can stop the Donald; he's even managed to test the power of traditional Republican kingmaker Fox News, as apparently earning their opprobrium over his treatment of their star face Megyn Kelly hasn't damaged him in the polls. What did he do this week? Well, not much, except starting a feud with Univision reporter Jorge Ramos, making fun of Asian "Engrish" speech patterns, slamming Jeb Bush by quoting his mother at him ("We've had enough Bushes", she apparently said), and, of course, posting a seemingly endless stream of insulting tweets, some at 3 in the morning. 7 Fear the Walking Dead
724,778 
AMC's spin-off to their hit series The Walking Dead premiered on August 23. 8 Straight Outta Compton (2015 film)
667,151 
The biopic of the short-lived but electrifying hip-hop group N.W.A was released on August 14 to superb reviews and blockbuster business- its $56 million opening weekend gross was higher than those for Terminator Genisys and Pixels combined, and it has held the #1 slot at the US box office for three weeks to a total of $134 million. It's interesting to note that African Americans make up just 12% of the US population, and films aimed specifically at that market, like those of Tyler Perry, are considered hits if they reach $60 million after their entire runs. That shows the breadth of this the movie's appeal across racial lines. That the film's story chimed so well with recent events in America likely also played a role. 9 Dr. Dre
587,509 
Far and away the most successful talent to emerge from N.W.A, Dr. Dre would go on to shepherd talents such as Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Xzibit, 50 Cent, and Kendrick Lamar, and ultimately become the richest man in hip hop, after Apple Inc.'s purchase of his company Beats Electronics earned him $620 million. He has wondered in the past if people have forgotten him; well the release of Straight Outta Compton has put that fear to rest. The soundtrack for Straight Outta Compton is Dre's first album in 16 years, and opened at #2 at the US chart amid critical acclaim. But his co-producing credit on the Straight Outta Compton film has also drawn some negative attention to its apparent ignorance of Dre's abusive past with women, for which Dre has copiously mea culpa-ed this week, no doubt to clear the air with Apple. 10 Ice Cube
575,126 
While still very much a rapper, the onetime N.W.A member is now arguably better known as an actor and a filmmaker. At the suggestion of John Singleton, he adapted his lyrical talents into screenwriting, and the result was the hit Friday film series, which introduced the world, for better or worse, to Chris Tucker. He also starred in a number of hit films including Are We There Yet? and Ride Along. And his son is carrying on the family business by playing him in Straight Outta Compton, but before you cry nepotism, the kid's getting good reviews. 11 Deaths in 2015 
568,736 
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. 12 N.W.A 
552,393 
Their heyday lasted all of four years, but the members of this pioneering group would go on to create their own industry and bring gangsta rap to the mainstream. 13 Stephen Hawking
718,775 
The former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon was a long-term resident of this list last year, thanks to the release of The Theory of Everything. His return is likely due to a new hypothesis he has proposed regarding information trapped in black holes, which has once again sent the general public slightly wobbly. In 1974, Hawking proved that, in order to coexist with the laws of quantum mechanics black holes must, paradoxically, evaporate. But if they do, they must gradually reveal the material they've gobbled up. Yet, nothing can escape a black hole, so will this material ever be revealed? Hawking has proposed two solutions: 1. material never actually reaches the core of a black hole, and instead remains encoded in a 2D "hologram" around the black hole's rim (known as its event horizon), or, much more excitingly, 2. material entering black holes is never destroyed at all, but instead enters a parallel universe. Feel free to wobble for a moment. 14 2015 World Championships in Athletics
508,281 
The 15th World Championship, which ran from August 22 to 30 in Beijing, saw the participation of 206 countries and Kenya top the medal tables for the first time. 15 La Tomatina
492,116 
The annual tomato-throwing free-for-all is held on the last Wednesday of August in the Spanish town of Buñol. 16 Usain Bolt
489,695 
The Jamaican sprinter, official World's Fastest Man, and joint contender with Thomas Crapper for the title of Possessor Of The Most Appropriate Surname In History, maintained his reputation by winning the 4x100 metre relay in a world-beating 37.36 seconds and the 100-metre sprint in 9.79 seconds. 17 Suge Knight
451,236 
While he did much to secure the careers of artists like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, the business practices of this record producer owed more to John Gotti than George Martin. Currently in jail on probation charges, Marion "Suge" Knight (the name is pronounced like "sugar" without the "-ar") has long been suspected of having a hand in the murder of rapper rival Biggie Smalls, and even in that of Tupac Shakur, despite having been in the car with him when he was shot. He appears in the film Straight Outta Compton, played by R. Marcus Taylor. If plans for a Tupac-centric sequel go ahead, expect his role to be massively expanded. 18 2015–16 UEFA Champions League
435,768 
The qualifying rounds for the European club championship concluded on August 26. The final, often dubbed "Europe's Superbowl", will be held on May 28, 2016 in Milan. 19 Teen Wolf (Season 5)
414,229 
You know, there are times when I must acknowledge that pop culture does not exist to please me. I absolutely loathed the original Teen Wolf, and assumed it would kill Michael J. Fox's career when it came out. Instead, it got a sequel, and animated TV series, and then a live action TV series, when someone noticed that male teenage werewolves were kindof a thing right now. Anyway, the mid-season finale aired on August 26. 20 Joycelyn Elders
408,395 
As learned in a Reddit thread this week, the first African American Surgeon General was fired in 1994 for suggesting that masturbation is "part of human sexuality, and perhaps should be taught." 21 Mundaneum
386,162 
Another Google Doodle! Nice to see them spurring intellectual curiosity again. This early 20th century attempt to catalogue all the world's knowledge has been described as a forerunner to Wikipedia, and was celebrated on the 147th birthday of one of its creators, Paul Otlet. 22 List of Bollywood films of 2015
355,883 
With the Bollywood summer season now in full swing, it's getting hard to keep up with the new releases, overshadowed as they are by current massive hits like Baahubali: The Beginning, so people turn to Wikipedia for help. 23 Mr. Robot (TV series) 
349,694 
The season finale of this cyberpunk thriller starring Christian Slater (pictured), was meant to air this week, but was postponed to next week in response to the Murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward. 24 Raksha Bandhan
333,315 
The Hindu festival of sibling love falls whenever the full moon is in the house of Shravana, or Capricorn (That's August 29 this year, if you were wondering). Traditions include tying woven bracelets called rakhi (pictured) around each other's wrists. And yes, that is a swastika; it's a perfectly acceptable Hindu symbol. 25 Pablo Escobar
325,838 
What Al Capone was to booze, this guy was to cocaine. And, for the first time, a major work of fiction, the Netflix series Narcos, which premiered this week, will chart his rise, brutal rule, and bloody end. It is odd that the Colombian drug lords haven't been romanticised as their Italian Chicago predecessors were. Perhaps it's simple xenophobia, or more likely, because we are so much more aware of how barbaric they were.
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.
- Note: If you came here from the Signpost article, please take any discussion of exclusions to this article's talk page.