Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (January 26 to February 1, 2014)[edit]

← Last week's report – Next week's Report →

Summary: The 56th Annual Grammy Awards had a far bigger impact on Wikipedia than their predecessor, and it's fairly easy to see why: Wikipedia favourites Daft Punk, Lorde and Macklemore, Top 25 timesharers in good standing, all won awards, making this a particularly resonant day for our user base. Of course, it didn't help that last year people had other things on their minds, such as asteroid impacts, the End of Days, and whether they forgot Valentine's Day again. Another odd theme this week is female murder suspects, as a cable telefilm about Lizzie Borden sent her into the Top 25 the same week Amanda Knox lost her appeal.

For the week of January 26 to February 1, 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	Notes
1	-	7	Daft Punk		1,257,049	This robot-helmet-wearing, cyberpunk-infused electronic music duo won five Grammys for their album Random Access Memories and their single "Get Lucky".
2	-	13	Lorde		839,683	The 17-year-old singer-songwriter from New Zealand won Grammys for Song of the Year and Best Vocal Performance for "Royals" the hit single from her modestly titled début album, Pure Heroine.
3	-	-	Chinese New Year		707,523	The Year of the Horse was off and running out the gate on 31 January. It is, interestingly, a Wood Horse, though obviously any connection to Greeks bearing gifts is purely coincidental.
4	-	-	Pete Seeger		605,313	The archetypal protest singer who wrote "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer", "Turn! Turn! Turn!" and pretty much all the other ones you remember from school that weren't by John Lennon or Bob Dylan, died this week at the age of 94, a good end to a long life that nonetheless, in this era of bland consumerist pop, feels like the passing of an age.
5	-	-	Royal Rumble (2014)		584,678	If there's one thing guaranteed to draw Wiki-users' attention other than peace protesters, it's people beating the chocolate frosting out of each other, even if it's mostly play-acting.
6	1	5	Jordan Belfort		532,147	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".
7	7	56	Facebook		515,350	A perennially popular article
8	-	6	Macklemore		507,534	One of the top-viewed Wiki articles of last year, it's not surprising that his four Grammy wins heralded his return to the Top 25.
9	-	-	Murder of Meredith Kercher		482,560	The long-running, twisty-turny court trial that has gained public attention mainly due to its combination of hot college girls, grisly murder and international stereotyping, reached another corner when the "star" of the show, Amanda Knox, was found guilty for a second time this week.
10	-	-	Amanda Knox		472,807	"Foxy Knoxy", as the British press leeringly call her, lost her appeal against her conviction for murdering Meredith Kercher this week (see above) and was ordered to serve a 28-year sentence.
11	5	6	The Wolf of Wall Street (2013 film)		464,27	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 $225 million worldwide
12	16	2	Jai Ho (film)		421,188	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.
13	-	-	Lizzie Borden		415,013	Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks; when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. Actually, she was acquitted of her parents' murder, but that hasn't stopped rumour replacing history. And while Lifetime's new retelling of the crime, which garnered 4.4 million viewers on January 25, clearly has fun with the ambiguities, it's pretty clear, both from the title and the casting of eternal bad girl Christina Ricci as Lizzie, which side of the fence we're meant to fall on.
14	-	-	56th Annual Grammy Awards	List	395,061	Not only were this year's Grammys particularly Wiki-friendly, they also featured a pan-orientational mass wedding conducted on-stage by Queen Latifah, which I suppose is better than a photo album.
15	10	65	Deaths in 2014	List	385,253	The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article.
16	-	-	Harriet Tubman		382,255	For once, a Google Doodle brought users to a featured article, and well-deserved. The escaped slave who became one of the star drivers of the Underground Railroad by helping bring 300 more to freedom, and then spent the remainder of her life campaigning for women's suffrage, was found in a pre-Millennial survey to be the third most famous civilian in America from before the Civil War (the others were Betsy Ross and Paul Revere); so I suppose that is one strike against the male bias in our culture.
17	-	-	Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo		370,874	One of the duo that is Daft Punk; given that neither often give interviews and are never seen in public without their helmets on, it's not surprising that the article's start-class.
18	6	2	Justin Bieber		366,358	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.
19	9	8	Frozen (2013 film)		364,184	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 quasi-predecessor both domestically and worldwide, with a total of nearly $870 million. It won a Golden Globe for Animated Feature and seems a shoo-in for the Oscar. I must say I'm looking forward to the phenomenon fading, as it means I won't constantly hear that Madonna song in my head every time I do this.
20	11	19	United States		345,976	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.
22	-	-	Thomas Bangalter		345,681	The other half of Daft Punk. Also start-class. I'll leave it to you to decide whether he's the "Daft" or the "Punk".
22	18	25	IPv6		327,458	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.
23	2	2	Juan Mata		318,683	Spanish footballer who was recently transferred from Chelsea F. C. to Manchester United for a club record sum of £37.1 million ($61.4 million)
24	19	2	True Detective (TV series)		311,759	This HBO police procedural stars Woody Harrelson and actor-of-the-moment Matthew McConaughey
25	-	-	Eugène Viollet-le-Duc		308,947	The Gothic revivalist architect, whose idea of "restoration" often included extra towers, got on the list thanks to a Google Doodle on his 200th birthday.

Number of views needed to reach Top 25 this week: 308,947. Last week: 262,551.

The revision of WP:5000 containing the data used to create this list.

Almosts: Leonardo DiCaprio (307,366 views); Sherlock (TV series) ( 302,292 views); Super Bowl XLVIII (297,243 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Specific exclusions this week:
- Jean Calvin: A surprising one this week; the French spelling of John Calvin, the bleak Protestant reformer who had a massive impact on the idea of America. Links to redirects are either bots or very specific websites. I'm very interested to see if a specific website was responsible, and if so which.