Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-12-22/Traffic report
{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-start|{{{1|Post-election traffic blues}}}|By Serendipodous and Milowent| 16 December 2016}}
Traffic reports of the most-viewed articles of the week for the past four weeks.
For the full top-25 lists, see WP:TOP25. Please also see our archives for weekly lists going back to January 2013, as well as recently added archives of the most popular articles in Wikipedia's earliest years: 2001–2004, see, e.g., Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/October 2001.
November 13–19
Waiting to exhale: We are still coming down from election, which saw the highest average numbers we've ever recorded, and numbers, while down from last week's ludicrous levels, are still not near normal. This list is very similar to last week's, with only a small number of new entries. It's almost as if last week's list breathed in a swarm of numbers and is slowly now breathing them out. – Serendipodous
For the week of November 13–19, the ten most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages&oldid=750511604 WP:5000] report, were:
::
| class="wikitable" |
| Rank
! Article ! Class ! Views ! Image ! Notes |
|---|
| 1
|align="right"|3,321,262 |File:Donald_Trump_January_2016.jpg |Numbers are slowly returning to normal for America's 45th president. Would that his country could. |
| 2
|align="right"|2,746,898 |File:Steve Bannon (5104952894).jpg |Apparently, the nation of America was shocked to the core when it learned that the head of the racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic Breitbart News, who had acted for months as Donald Trump's chief strategist, would continue to act as Donald Trump's chief strategist. What? You elect someone specifically to disrupt the status quo and you're surprised when the status quo is disrupted? |
| 3
|United States presidential election, 2016 |align="right"|1,693,874 |File:Great_Seal_of_the_United_States_(obverse).svg |Views peaked at 2.36 million on November 9. |
| 4
|align="right"|1,422,580 |File:Melania Trump in February 2016 (cropped).jpg |Mrs. Trump will be the first foreign-born First Lady of the United States since Louisa Adams in the 1820s. Louisa was British, so Melania will be the first non-native speaker of English to hold the title, which is a bit bizarre considering Trump's rhetoric on immigration. Though her English is not perfect, she does speak six languages – a feat few people, and fewer native English-speakers, can claim. |
| 5
|File:Featured article star.svg |align="right"|1,354,307 |File:Queen Elizabeth II March 2015.jpg |For the third consecutive week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy. |
| 6
|align="right"|1,215,708 |File:Madison Square Garden, February 2013.jpg |The latest Ultimate Fighting Championship was held on November 12, 2016 at Madison Square Garden. The headline match was won by Conor McGregor who defeated Eddie Alvarez in a technical knockout in the second round. |
| 7
|align="right"|1,203,940 |The discoverer of insulin got a Google Doodle on his 125th birthday on November 14. |
| 8
|align="right"|1,148,947 |File:Ivanka Trump RNC July 2016 (cropped).jpg |No doubt the most liked Trump outside core Trump-fandom. Her views regularly exceeded those of her siblings. In the report for the July 2016 week of the Republican National Convention, Ivanka placed #4, ahead of her three adult siblings. (Trump's youngest child Barron Trump is only 10 years old and should not have his own article here, if the precedent set for Malia and Sasha Obama is applied. ETA: And he no longer does after an AfD closed. - MW) |
| 9
|Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film) |align="right"|1,137,420 |This cinematic spinoff to the Harry Potter series, set in 1920s New York, and scripted by the books' author herself, JK Rowling (pictured), opened this week to decent notices (it currently has a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a solid, though unspectacular, $75 million US opening. |
| 10
|align="right"|1,107,299 |File:Conor_McGregor,_UFC_189_World_Tour_London_(2).jpg |See #6. |
November 20–26
A Holiday Week, and Some Oldies: The death of Fidel Castro (#1) was the most-viewed topic of the week, followed by the Harry Potter universe film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. And the popular British TV series The Crown continues to push British royalty into the chart. The American Thanksgiving holiday (#3) and consumer holiday of Black Friday (#5) returned for another annual appearance, as United States politics continues to recede a bit in popularity, and view counts return to more normal ranges.
In other news, The Top 25 report's archives are slowing expanding to include data on article popularity from long ago, to the extent we can track it down. See, for example, the most popular article list for October 2003. Wikipedia was a much smaller place 13 years ago. While Fidel Castro got 1.76 million views last week, in October 2003, the most viewed page (after the Main Page), was "Current events" with a mere 26,838 views for the entire month. Back then, however, traditional encyclopedic topics could compete for top spots, and Mathematics was #5 for the month with 13,796 views. Last week it only placed #3685 (31,637 views). – Milowent
For the week of November 20–26, the ten most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages&oldid=751933754 WP:5000] report were:
::
| class="wikitable" |
| Rank
! Article ! Class ! Views ! Image ! Notes |
|---|
| 1
|align="right"|1,760,389 |File:Fidel_Castro_-_MATS_Terminal_Washington_1959.jpg |Somebody had to knock Donald Trump (#4) out of the top spot. The strongman ruler of Cuba, though out of the spotlight the last few years due to his poor health, died on November 25 at age 90. |
| 2
|Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film) |align="right"|1,617,874 |Up from #9 last week, with almost 500,000 more views. This cinematic spinoff to the Harry Potter series, set in 1920s New York, and scripted by the books' author herself, JK Rowling (pictured), opened this week to decent notices (a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a solid, though unspectacular, $75 million US opening. |
| 3
|align="right"|1,279,737 |Off about 100,000 views from last year, but that's fairly consistent. This beloved North American holiday has, in the past, been very ill-used by Wikipedia viewers. Every year, when it came around, immediately money-spinning spammers started flooding Wikipedia with fake views for this article, thus forcing us to remove what should have been a perfectly acceptable annual addition to this list. For the second year, however, it appears that the article has been included entirely on its own merits without any, ahem, stuffing. |
| 4
|align="right"|1,249,878 |File:Donald_Trump_January_2016.jpg |Numbers continue to drop since the November 8 United States presidential election, 2016 (#8), but they can be expected to rebound in January. Also, Trump continues to tweet. |
| 5
|align="right"|1,149,155 |File:DCUSA.Gallery10.TargetBlackFriday.Wikipedia.jpg |The day after Thanksgiving is also the day that retailers have earned enough to cover their debts from the previous year, and are thus "in the black" (at least, that's what they say; in truth it probably originated as a reaction to the traffic). In recent years it has become a major day on the shopping calendar and the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season, though Cyber Monday is increasing in popularity every year, allowing the spirit of consumerism to continue to expand. |
| 6
|align="right"|1,096,605 |Pay-per-view wrestling event held on November 20. Goldberg (#22) was among the match winners. |
| 7
|File:Featured article star.svg |align="right"|1,050,072 |File:Queen Elizabeth II March 2015.jpg |For the fourth consecutive week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy. |
| 8
|United States presidential election, 2016 |align="right"|940,657 |File:Great_Seal_of_the_United_States_(obverse).svg |Still popular as people refresh their screens occasionally to make sure Wikipedia was not vandalized. |
| 9
|align="right"|901,852 |File:Betsy_DeVos_2005_crop.jpg |The billionaire and education activist for school voucher programs has been nominated to be president Trump's secretary of education. |
| 10
|align="right"|806,567 |To be clear: this is not based on a novel by Michael Crichton: Crichton was a filmmaker as well as a novelist, and Westworld was a film he both wrote and directed back in the 1970s. But whereas that was a straightforward "monsters on the loose" movie, about a Western-themed amusement park staffed by hyperrealistic robots who go insane and start murdering the guests (sound familiar?), this series looks like it will be taking a more thoughtful, hard scifi approach, with the robots' gradual evolution from programming to quasi-consciousness forming the main plot thread. With a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and ratings of just under 2 million (roughly what Game of Thrones received when it began), it's off to a solid start, though whether it will be the show to carry HBO past Game of Thrones{{'}}s end remains to be seen. |
November 27 – December 3
Breathe steady: What's this? A two-million view cap? A ~400,000 entry? Television shows? Movies? Reddit threads? Google Doodles? Recently dead people? Could it be that Wikipedia has finally returned to normal? Well not exactly. There's a remarkably shallow curve at the top, meaning viewership is still up on previous weeks, mostly due to news events such as the appointment of James Mattis as US Secretary of Defense, or the tragic crash of LaMia Airlines Flight 2933. But if things keep going the way they are, this job might just get boring again. – Serendipodous
For the week of November 27 to December 3, the ten most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages&oldid=752926239 WP:5000] report were:
::
| class="wikitable" |
| Rank
! Article ! Class ! Views ! Image ! Notes |
|---|
| 1
|align="right"|2,401,418 |File:Fidel_Castro_-_MATS_Terminal_Washington_1959.jpg |Numbers are up by nearly a million on last week, so obviously people still cry for la revolucion to vivir, even though el revolucionario está muerto. |
| 2
|Associação Chapecoense de Futebol |align="right"|1,406,474 | |The football team that tragically lost most of its members in the crash of LaMia Airlines Flight 2933 (see #11) |
| 3
|align="right"|1,385,705 |File:Jagadish Chandra Bose 1926.jpg |The Indian biologist who invented the crescograph received a Google Doodle on his 158th birthday on November 30. |
| 4
|align="right"|1,059,661 |Amid a string of controversial Trump appointments, the former general's appointment as secretary of defense feels almost normal. About the only thing controversial about him is a mildly hawkish stance on Iran. |
| 5
|align="right"|1,047,171 |File:Louisa May Alcott headshot.jpg |The author of Little Women and Little Men got a Google Doodle on her 184th birthday on November 29. |
| 6
|align="right"|920,398 |Numbers are up for the penultimate episode of the season, which saw the realisation of a number of long-held fan theories and bodes well for next week's 90-minute season finale. A second season has been greenlit, so expect even more water cooler moments next year. |
| 7
|Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film) |align="right"|830,774 |Down from #2 last week. This cinematic spinoff to the Harry Potter series, set in 1920s New York, and scripted by the books' author herself, JK Rowling (pictured), opened this week to decent notices (a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a solid, though unspectacular, $75 million US opening. |
| 8
|File:Featured article star.svg |align="right"|825,747 |File:Queen Elizabeth II March 2015.jpg |For the fifth consecutive week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy. |
| 9
|align="right"|773,350 |The deaths list has always acted as this list's lodestone; it is so consistent on a day to day basis that where it appears is an indication of the weekly traffic levels. That said, we may have to recalibrate our mathematics, since its numbers have been slowly going up over the last few weeks. |
| 10
|align="right"|717,438 |File:Donald_Trump_January_2016.jpg |Numbers continue to drop since the November 8 United States presidential election, 2016 (#11), but they can be expected to rebound in January. Also, Trump continues to tweet. |
December 4–10
India rising: Topics from India, usually films, often make this chart. But the death of Jayalalithaa, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, is notable for rising to #1 and over 4 million views, though never before appearing on the chart. Former minister M. G. Ramachandran also placed #5. It took 678K views to hit the Top 10, the lowest threshold since the slow week of October 16-22. – Milowent
For the week of December 4–10, the 10 most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages&oldid=754165098 WP:5000] report were:
::
| class="wikitable" |
| Rank
! Article ! Class ! Views ! Image ! Notes |
|---|
| 1
|align="right"|4,067,619 |Jayalalithaa Jayaram was an Indian actress and politician who served five terms as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, for over 14 years between 1991 and 2016. She fell ill in September 2016, and died on December 5 after a long hospitalization. India declared a day of national mourning, while the state of Tamil Nadu declared seven days of mourning. |
| 2
|align="right"|1,280,797 |The first American astronaut to orbit Earth in 1962, and later a United States Senator. With all the notable deaths this year, it makes me think that the 20th century itself really died in 2016. Yes, the icons of every century linger into the next, but if you want to draw a line, this year seems like a good one. |
| 3
|align="right"|1,272,033 |The season finale episode, The Bicameral Mind, aired on December 4. |
| 4
|Rømer's determination of the speed of light |align="right"|997,296 |Has to be Reddit. Also an interesting article on a topic I knew nothing about. |
| 5
|align="right"|861,766 | |Indian actor who was Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu from 1977-87, so no doubt popular due to #1. |
| 6
|align="right"|861,766 | |This popular Pakistani recording artist died on December 7 in the crash of Pakistan International Airlines Flight 661. |
| 7
|align="right"|761,247 |The deaths list has always acted as this list's lodestone; it is so consistent on a day to day basis that where it appears is an indication of the weekly traffic levels. That said, we may have to recalibrate our mathematics, since its numbers have been slowly going up over the past few weeks, and continued this week. |
| 8
|align="right"|759,816 |This American actor turned 100 on December 9. |
| 9
|align="right"|694,555 |File:Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor_Japanese_planes_view.jpg |The 75th anniversary of Japan's attack on the United States, which led to the entry of the U.S. into World War II, occurred on December 7. The memorial services held for the event will likely be the last major gathering of living survivors of the attack. |
| 10
|align="right"|678,802 |Details about the infamous rape scene in this 1972 movie [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/12/05/why-the-last-tango-in-paris-rape-scene-is-generating-such-an-outcry-now/ caused controversy] this week. |
