The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (November 20 to 26, 2016)[edit]

Prepared with commentary by Milowent.

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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 holiday of Thanksgiving (#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, our 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).

For the week of November 20 to 26, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Fidel Castro	1,760,389	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)	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	Thanksgiving	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	Donald Trump	1,249,878	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	Black Friday (shopping)	1,149,155	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	Survivor Series (2016)	1,096,605	Pay-per-view wrestling event held on November 20. Goldberg (#22) was among the match winners.
7	Elizabeth II	1,050,072	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	940,657	Still popular as people refresh their screens occasionally to make sure Wikipedia was not vandalized.
9	Betsy DeVos	901,852	The billionaire and education activist for school voucher programs has been nominated to be President Trump's Secretary of Education.
10	Westworld (TV series)	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.
11	Florence Henderson	765,901	The actress best known in America for playing the mom role of Carol Brady on The Brady Bunch (1969-1974), died on November 24 at age 82, of heart failure.
12	Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon	746,023	The only sibling of Queen Elizabeth II, she is portrayed by Vanessa Kirby in The Crown television series.
13	Deaths in 2016	701,956	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. Two weeks ago, it was pushed to #34, the lowest we've ever seen it. It has now returned to a more normal range as a constant of the Top 25.
14	Thanksgiving (United States)	681,009	See #3.
15	Nikki Haley	615,612	The Governor of South Carolina was not a huge Trump fan, but will be his nominee to be Ambassador to the United Nations.
16	Animals in War Memorial	600,341	It's Reddit!
17	Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them	564,317	See #2.
18	Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh	559,710	The husband of Queen Elizabeth II, he is portrayed by Matt Smith in The Crown television series.
19	George VI	549,841	Queen Elizabeth's dad made an appearance The Crown, in which he is played by Jared Harris. The number of Crown related articles in the Top 25 has been quite impressive the past few weeks. But for the recent election, we would be highlighting this success more vigorously.
20	Mannequin Challenge	549,199	Down almost 300,000 views from last week. The viral phenomenon began last month, but may reached peak participation last week. What is it? Basically you film yourself standing completely still in a visually crowded environment to create the eerie sense of being outside time seen in films like The Matrix. Unlike the ice bucket challenge, which hit #1 on the chart in August 2014, it doesn't have the virtue of being for charity. But it is better than twerking, which plagued us in 2013.
21	Debito Arudou	518,186	Seems to be a popular Reddit topic. ([1])
22	Bill Goldberg	488,951	See #6.
23	Alt-right	486,909	If this term seems pretty new to you, you're not wrong. This article wasn't even created until January 31 of this year. One of its first primary editors, User:Connor Machiavelli, was also a big editor and promoter of topics like White nationalism, until he was indefinitely blocked.
24	Winston Churchill	484,916	I suspect he appears in The Crown as well?
25	Gilmore Girls	475,783	This American television series ran from 2000-2007, but was resurrected this week with a new season on Netflix, as Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.

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 exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% 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.