The Signpost

Traffic report

Screens, sport, Reddit, and death

For the second consecutive week, the most viewed article had less than one million views, the only two weeks that has happened in all of 2015. Five of the top 10 this week are television or movie related articles, two are football-related, two are Reddit-fueled entries, and the last is the perennial favorite Deaths in 2015, whose average 550,000 views every week tends to rise into the top 10 when other things are not drawing our attention.

As for Wikipedia editors, the list of the most edited articles over the same period (October 4–10), led by recent Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, has little overlap with the most viewed list; see here.

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

For the week of October 4–10, 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 American Horror Story: Hotel C-Class 883,185
The fifth season of American Horror Story premiered on October 7. The first episode, Checking In, has been watched by 12.17 million people as of October 11.
2 The Martian (film) C-class 833,566
Holding steady at #2 for a second week, with more than 200,000 additional views. The adaptation of Andy Weir's popular novel about an astronaut stranded on Mars (played by Matt Damon) has grossed $227.7 million as of October 11 on a budget of $108 million. Presumably this means far more people have seen this film than our #1 entry this week, though the phenomenon of darker episodic television shows being a favorite of Wikipedia readers, and placing high on our charts, is well documented.
3 Pablo Escobar B-Class 667,497
Down from #1 last week. The fascination with the Netflix series Narcos continues to keep the Capone of cocaine near the top of this list.
4 Jürgen Klopp B-Class 667,497
This German football manager of Borussia Dortmund from 2008-15 was named manager of Liverpool this week, replacing the sacked Brendan Rodgers. Klopp wasn't even in the WP:5000 last week, but British press attention was immediate. (He had a respectable 40,459 desktop views in September according to stats.grok.se, over three times the views the German version of his article had.).
5 Great white shark Good Article 571,711
Reddit learned on October 5 after an Orca killed a great white shark in 2000, all nearby great whites vanished. See Great white shark#Natural threats.
6 Deaths in 2015 List 540,654
As always, the viewing figures for this article have been remarkably constant, apparently heedless of who actually died. Deaths from the list this week included American academic S. Malcolm Gillis (president of Rice University from 1993-2004) (October 4); Belgian author Jos Vandeloo (October 5); Hungarian-French writer Christine Arnothy (October 6) (pictured at left); Kenyan politician Julius Muthamia (October 7); American chef Paul Prudhomme (October 8); Chinese politician Du Runsheng (October 9); and Indian Tamil actress Manorama (October 10).
7 Mary Fields Stub-Class 518,800
Another Reddit entry. The first African-American woman to work as a mail carrier for the United States Postal Service.
8 Fear the Walking Dead C-Class 463,462
The sixth and final episode of the first season of AMC's spin-off to their hit series The Walking Dead aired on 4 October.
9 UEFA Euro 2016 qualifying Start-class 452,604 Play continues in this tournament through mid-November.
10 Steve Jobs B-Class 437,076
Steve Jobs died four years ago, and the latest entry to the mind-boggling list of artistic depictions of Steve Jobs is the movie Steve Jobs, which opened in New York and Los Angeles on October 9. Writer Aaron Sorkin also previously tackled Facebook in The Social Network. Can a film about Wikipedia be far behind? Jobs director Danny Boyle has already said he's in favor of it. Could Chris Pratt as Jimbo Wales be far off? If you've read this far, put your own casting suggestions in the comments!

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-14/Traffic_report