Most popular Wikipedia articles of the last week

The season finale of Game of Thrones ensured that the epic high fantasy series would dominate the top 10 again last week; however, it was joined by the perennially popular children's author Maurice Sendak, whose 85th birthday was celebrated with a Google Doodle, and by the number one movie of the week, Man of Steel. Politics rarely impacts the top 10, but the controversy over the PRISM surveillance program proved too potent to miss.

Please see here for the top 25 articles of the week, plus analysis.

For the week of 8 to 15 June, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Maurice Sendak	1,717,368	A Google Doodle to celebrate the children's author's would-have-been 85th birthday sent almost 2 million people to his Wikipedia page.
2	Man of Steel (film)	1,117,658	The second attempt to rework the Superman mythos for modern cinema, (after Bryan Singer's Superman Returns) this film earned $125.1 million over its first weekend, setting a record for the month of June.
3	Game of Thrones	1,000,649	The season finale of this popular TV show drew 5.39 million viewers; its highest rating ever.
4	State of Decay (video game)	715,148	Much anticipated zombie apocalypse video game.
5	Game of Thrones (season 3)	600,721	See #3 above
6	List of Game of Thrones episodes	590,697	see #3 and #5 above
7	Facebook	580,390	A perennially popular article.
8	Edward Snowden	576,664	The PRISM program whistleblower became the major discussion point in the news this week.
9	PlayStation 4	519,716	Sony unveiled their addition to the already controversial eighth generation of video game consoles, to positive reception.
10	The Last of Us	500,214	Another much-anticipated post-apocalypse video game which was released on June 13.

Notes:

• This list is derived from the WP:5000 report. It excludes the Wikipedia main page (and "wiki"), non-article pages, and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views).
• Standard removals this week include Cat anatomy (explanation still unknown for its continuing high view counts)

In this issue

19 June 2013 (all comments)

Op-ed

Traffic report

In the media

WikiProject report

News and notes

Featured content

Discussion report

Technology report

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• A minor point but our article states that the reception to the PS4 has been positive, rather than mixed. Stephen 02:02, 21 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Cat anatomy is probably popular because many universities in the United States force their undergraduate Human Anatomy and Human Physiology labs to use cats instead of cadavers. Cadavers are hard to find (particularly if the university doesn't have a medical school - what did you think happened to all those people who donated their bodies to science?), very expensive and come with a long list of rules, whereas embalmed cats purchased from a commercial supplier of embalmed cats... don't. I'd wager that the article is frequently viewed by those who need to brush up before lab practicals and exams.
  (Personally, my Human Anatomy lab used cadavers but my Human Physiology lab at another university used cats, so I can say with confidence that if you were a human anatomy student who never got to dissect a cadaver, you were cheated.) You may now forget this entire conversation and resume your editing. ;-) KrakatoaKatie 08:57, 22 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, but ... over 100,000 students each day are viewing that one article? Over three million in the last thirty days? ;-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 01:06, 23 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • The most likely reason for its high view counts, according to a chat I had at the London Wiki meetup, is an automated malware program checking to see if it has access to the internet from an infected computer by accessing a pre-programmed page. Serendi^podous 15:43, 23 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikistats has the count for every language for the month of April 2013 now. However, a surprising number of languages had artificially high counts for Leonhard Euler that month, and it looks like all of these thousands of hits were occurring on the same day across all languages that have that article. This is obviously something automated and not natural, but what? Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 13:48, 27 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not automated at all. A Google Doodle about him shot interest in him up across the board. Serendi^podous 14:47, 27 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, thank you for solving that mystery for me! Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 18:16, 27 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]