Debates and escapes

Your traffic reports for the weeks of September 25 – October 1, and October 2–9.

If not for the death of American baseball player José Fernández (#1), Donald Trump (#2) would have been the most viewed article of the week, no doubt due to the attention-grabbing spectacle of the first U.S. presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton (#5). The only other debate-related subject to make the WP:TOP25 was Alicia Machado (#13), a topic which Clinton brought up to illustrate Trump's history of derogatory remarks about women, and which caused Trump to keep defending his comments for most of the week. Aside from that, the chart this week is a mix of pop culture topics with a number of Reddit "Today I Learned" threads elevating random articles into the lower rungs of the Top 25.

For the full top-25 lists (and archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see WP:MOSTEDITED.

For the week of September 25 to October 1, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	José Fernández (pitcher)		1,762,983		The Cuban-born American baseball player for the Miami Marlins died in a boating accident on September 25 at the age of 24. Though a popular player, it is hard to pinpoint exactly why his death generated so many views, except in part because he died on the first day of this chart's data, so the chart captures the full run of attention caused in the week after his death.
2	Donald Trump		1,201,566		455,000 of these views came on September 27, which for United States timezones catches the first presidential debate which occurred on the evening of September 26 and its news-dominating aftermath. Trump consistently places higher in this chart than Hillary Clinton, usually because he is doing or saying eye-opening things.
3	Arnold Palmer		915,706		The American golf great died on September 25 at age 87. He was generally regarded as one of the greatest players in the sport's history. Dating back to 1955, he won numerous events on both the PGA Tour and the circuit now known as PGA Tour Champions.
4	Pablo Escobar		813,231		Narcos is back on your television screens, meaning Don Pablo is back on the list for another week.
5	Hillary Clinton		753,800		311K views on September 27. With the presidential debates underway and the American election finally getting close, Clinton and Trump may remain high in the charts for the next few weeks.
6	Luke Cage		710,850		The debut of the Luke Cage (#10) TV series on Netflix teaches me about yet another superhero character I've never heard about before.
7	László Bíró		710,850		A Google Doodle for the inventor of the ballpoint pen.
8	Deaths in 2016		646,900		The views for the annual list of deaths are remarkably consistent on a day to day basis. It is consistently higher in the first half of 2016 with a string of highly notable deaths, but things seem to be calming down a bit. Where the article appears in this chart is entirely dependent on how many subjects in a week happened to exceed this bellwether in views.
9	Toys in the Attic (album)		547,193		A Reddit thread caused a burst of popularity about this 1975 album by Aerosmith on September 26.
10	Luke Cage (TV series)		710,850		See #6. Mike Colter (pictured) plays the lead role.

The main theme this week, as it is for many weeks, is real life drama clashing with unabashed escapism. The mayhem of Hurricane Matthew, Donald Trump's outrageous behaviour, and the caterwaul that was the vice-Presidential debate came up against the premiere of Luke Cage, Netflix's latest Marvel property, the release of the film adaptation of The Girl on the Train, and Westworld, the first of what will likely be many attempts by HBO to find a successor to Game of Thrones. TV also appeared in the guise of Pablo Escobar, the "star" of the docudrama Narcos, and Amanda Knox, the acquitted murder suspect and subject of an eponymous documentary, also on Netflix. One television property notable in its absence however, is Stranger Things, which finally left the Top 25 after eleven straight weeks.

For the week of October 2 to 9, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Luke Cage		1,486,560		Marvel's Blaxploitation-themed superhero (a.k.a. Power Man) has been a cult favourite for decades (Nicolas Cage named himself after him), but has never seen mainstream success, until now; as played by Mike Colter, pictured, he stars as the hero of his own eponymous series on Netflix.
2	Westworld (TV series)		1,050,532		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.
3	Luke Cage (TV series)		1,018,198		The latest in Marvel Studios' Netflix stable premiered in its entirety on September 30. It was reportedly so popular that it overloaded Netflix's servers and shut it down.
4	Donald Trump		972,408		My biweekly game of "What Did Donald Do?" is unfailingly joyless and often fruitless, but I occasionally strike gold: in this case, a decade-old tape in which he not only admits to repeated sexual assault but leeringly ogles a soap opera star. Numbers shot up after the revelation, but went up even further on the 10th, after the second Presidential debate, so expect him to be higher next week.
5	M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story		818,538		Numbers have doubled for this Indian biographical sports film about cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni, which debuted on September 30. The lead role is played by Sushant Singh Rajput (pictured).
6	Sushant Singh Rajput		782,830		The star of M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (see above)
7	Hurricane Matthew		721,520		When Wikipedia describes a hurricane as the worst since 2005 (aka the year that God idly pondered redoing that whole Flood thing) that sets you back in your chair, and to know that most of the more than 1000 deaths have been in Haiti, a country that by now must feel God has forsaken it, deepens the sense of loss and hopelessness. Noam Chomsky once predicted that Haiti may soon become uninhabitable. We can only do our best to ensure that does not happen.
8	Never Gonna Give You Up		682,050		Maybe if Reddit didn't have such a useless search engine I wouldn't hate it so much. I need to come up with a new word for that feeling when you know an entry on this list has to be from Reddit but the entire Internet is just shrugging its shoulders at you and going "Idno". I admit, that would not be a widely applicable word, but still, I would use it. And I did find the entry in the end. Rick Astley did a Reddit AMA this week; "AMA" stands for "ask me anything", but apparently what they wanted to know about was that godawful song that spawned a universe of unfunny Internet memes. You know, I never cared about that song one way or the other when it came out. Now I hate it. Such is the power of the Internet.
9	Amanda Knox		674,318		Another case of the media constructing a story it had no cause to, in this case the conviction (and later acquittal) of this American student of the murder of her British roommate while in Italy. The British tabloids being what they are, I refused to go within a mile of its toxicity, particularly when they started calling her "Foxy Knoxy" and painting her as a femme fatale. So far had I put this from my mind that I was surprised to learn she had been acquitted. Her trial and tribulations have become the subject of a Netflix documentary, called, oddly enough, Amanda Knox, which was released this week.
10	Westworld		671,142		It's possible I suppose that our readers are genuinely interested in the original 1973 cult classic starring Yul Brynner, but most likely it's just people looking for the TV series (see #2)