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Auld Lang Syne

We end 2014 and and start 2015 with the normal array of year-end activities, including movie watching with Bollywood film PK (#1) topping the list, followed by The Interview (2014 film) (#2), 2014 in film (#10), and five other films in the rest of the Top 25, plus a number of articles about the subjects of these films. We celebrated the New Year by singing "Auld Lang Syne" (#11), or perhaps watching Adam Lambert (#9) perform with Queen. But we could not avoid a final tragedy with the crash of Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 (#4) on December 28.

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.

For the week of December 28, 2014 to January 3, 2015, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 PK (film) C-class 1,007,428
About thirty thousand fewer views than last week, when it stood at #3, this Bollywood film, starring Aamir Khan and Anushka Sharma, tops the chart this week. Released on December 19, it has already become the highest grossing Bollywood film of all time, with a worldwide box office of over US$94 million. It is also the first Bollywood film to ever top this report.
2 The Interview (2014 film) B-class 824,917
Down from 1.2 million views and #1 last week. See past reports for the whole sordid history of this film, which, as of January 4, 2015, had earned more than $31 million from online sales and rentals.
3 Chris Kyle Start-class 724,445
This American sniper, whose life was the subject of the appropriately named Clint Eastwood-directed film American Sniper, which went into wide release on Christmas Day, is considered the most lethal in US military history, with 160 confirmed kills. Unfortunately, he was murdered last year by a PTSD-afflicted veteran whom he had taken to a shooting range. Before he died, he had claimed that he had once punched former wrestler and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura in 2006 for badmouthing U.S. President Bush and the military. Ventura sued him for defamation, eventually getting a $1.8 million jury award. Last week, Ventura filed a new lawsuit directly against HarperCollins, who published Kyle's book, called, naturally, American Sniper.
4 Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 Start-class 704,645
Unfortunately we could not end 2014 without yet another major passenger aircraft crash. On December 28, 2014, this flight crashed in bad weather while en route to Singapore, killing all 155 passengers and 7 crew on board.
5 Jim Harbaugh B-Class 684,677
Jim Harbaugh is an American football coach. After serving as the head coach of the professional San Francisco 49ers from 2011-2014, he was named the new head coach of the University of Michigan.
6 AirAsia B-Class 646,448
See #4
7 Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 B-Class 619,770
The crash of Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 (#4) understandably caused readers to once again ask "did they ever find that other plane?" The answer is no. An "underwater search" that began in October is not scheduled to be completed until around May, so it could be quite some time.
8 Stephen Hawking B-Class 598,974
The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon makes his ninth straight appearance in the Top 25 this week, thanks in large part to his biopic, The Theory of Everything, which opened in the United States on November 7.
9 Adam Lambert C-Class 544,868
Lambert is an American singer who was the runner up in the eighth season of American Idol in 2009. He performed a New Year's Eve concert in London with Queen (see Queen & Adam Lambert Rock Big Ben Live), which proved quite popular.
10 2014 in film N/A 539,382
No doubt this was popular among readers wishing to see what the most popular movies were of the year. Transformers: Age of Extinction starring Mark Wahlberg (pictured) was the highest-grossing film of the year, making over $1.08 billion, which puts it at number 10 on the all time list.

















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