Un-presidential politics

Your Traffic Reports for the weeks of October 9-15, 15-22, and 23-29, 2016.

The U.S. presidential election dominated the charts for another week, keyed off of the rather distasteful second presidential debate held on October 9. Is it over yet? NO! Not until November 8.

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 October 9–15, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Donald Trump		1,951,789		The second U.S. presidential debate occurred on October 9 and it was a rather nasty one by American standards.
2	Billy Bush		1,451,164		It's been an interesting time for the cousin of Jeb and Dubya. First he was blasted for failing to catch Ryan Lochte out on his preschool lying, and then the tape of his 2005 talk with Donald Trump came out.
3	Hillary Clinton		1,009,711		That Billy Bush got more views than Clinton tells you the 2005 Trump videotape was a huge story of interest.
4	Bhumibol Adulyadej		921,863		The King of Thailand died on October 13, after 70 years on the throne. Think about that for a minute. During his reign, David Bowie was born, lived his whole life, and died of old age. His subjects revered him (he is already being called "the Great") but his son, the crown prince Vajiralongkorn (see #12), is generally seen in unflattering terms, though thanks to Thailand's merciless Lèse-majesté laws, which ban public criticism of the Royal Family, such opinions are not expressed openly. Thailand has been in a state of semi-permanent political crisis for more than a decade, and is currently under the control of a military junta. Much now depends on how the Thai people react to the succession, though given the myriad pressures involved, no one can guess what the outcome will be.
5	Bob Dylan		915,438		The famed singer-songwriter won the Nobel Prize for Literature. A rather unusual pick, the first musician in the history of the award, and thus is getting a fair amount of attention.
6	Westworld (TV series)		910,820		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.
7	MS The World		681,608		Courtesy of Reddit: [1]
8	Seat belt		648,726		As learned in a Reddit thread this week, Volvo invented the seat belt, but gave the patent away because they believed lives were more important than profit. And yet, we still buy other cars.
9	Bill Clinton		638,332		Bill Clinton's and Donald Trump's relationships with women have been the stuff of gossip columns for some time. Not going to say anything more to feed the internet troll machines.
10	Luke Cage		629,293		Down from #1 last week. 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.

As the U.S presidential election approaches, Donald Trump is again number one in our Halloween edition rankings. His refusal at the last debate to say whether he will accept the election result if he loses raised much concern in the press. In other news, Reddit cracked the 5-topic barrier again. I wonder if this is the new normal or just an artifact from the end of summer?

For the week of October 16–22, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Donald Trump		2,140,830		The second U.S. presidential debate was nasty; the final one was scary. Trump's statement that he would "keep us in suspense" regarding whether or not he would accept the election result (an election he has already repeatedly described as "rigged") may have engendered more suspense than he intended (or not. Who knows?).
2	Witch window		831,274		I'd need to check but this could be the highest-charting Reddit thread since we started the project. These diagonal windows, found almost exclusively in 19th-century farmhouses in Vermont, were intended to ward off witches, since they couldn't fly their broomsticks through them. OK, so what about all the other windows? The thread's popularity is likely due to the approach of Halloween, a holiday that usually has little impact on this list.
3	2004 Harvard–Yale prank		739,821		Another Reddit thread, this one concerning a practical joke at the annual Harvard–Yale football game in which Yale supporters handed out cards for the Harvard supporters to flash, and when used together spelled out "WE SUCK". You gotta hand it to whoever came up with that, and even more for pulling it off.
4	Westworld (TV series)		729,784		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.
5	Logan (film)		669,776		The next film in the X-Men film series will feature the final outings of both Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Hugh Jackman as Logan, a.k.a Wolverine. The surprisingly touching trailer launched this week, and generated a great deal of positive buzz.
6	Hillary Clinton		650,343		Clinton continues to be less interesting to our readers than "what will he do next?" Trump, despite public opinion appearing to agree that she won all three debates.
7	Michel'le		646,377		The R&B singer and former girlfriend of both Dr Dre and Suge Knight, both of whom she claims beat her repeatedly, was the subject of a hit docudrama on Lifetime this week, Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge & Michel'le.
8	Melania Trump		631,945		Spouse of #1.
9	Deaths in 2016		606,553		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.
10	Dr. Dre		486,086		The billionaire music producer and ex-boyfriend of Michel'le (see above) filed a cease and desist order against the premiere of the docudrama Surviving Compton, claiming that he never beat her, as the program alleges. He also threatened to sue Michel'le for defamation of character.

In a week where no article could break one million views, a Google Doodle celebrating Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who discovered bacteria, tops the chart. Replacing the dominance of U.S. politics with an article about the human search for knowledge is heartening. Beyond that, Wikipedia readers filled their brains with The Walking Dead television show, filling up three slots in the Top 10, and six in the Top 25.

For the week of October 23 to 29, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Antonie van Leeuwenhoek		970,522		For the first time this year, the top article of the week received under one million views. (The last time was when Donald Trump led with 914K views for December 6-12, 2015.) Yet, the top honors still go to the Dutch scientist, whose birthday was celebrated by a Google Doodle on October 24 which celebrated his discovery of "little animals", or animalcules, now known as bacteria.
2	The Walking Dead (TV series)		967,104		Season 7 (#8) of the popular television show, a mainstay of this chart when it is airing, debuted on October 23.
3	Donald Trump		898,740		No matter what you do, Donald Trump is always near the top of your Internet. Pageviews show his views were steady this week, in the general range of 110-150K per day, except for Saturday Oct 29 when it received only 81,915 views.
4	Pete Burns		771,654		The leader of the band Dead or Alive, best known for the 1985 hit You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), died on October 23 at age 57 of cardiac arrest. You Spin Me Round was a fairly eccentric song to became a hit in the United States. In later years, Burns received attention in British media when he appeared on Celebrity Big Brother 4 in 2006.
5	Chicago Cubs		764,703		The American baseball team has not won a World Series since 1908, but made it to the 2016 World Series, playing against the Cleveland Indians.
6	Negan		742,226		The Walking Dead character first appeared in the last season's finale.
7	Halloween		728,419		Views were up in anticipation of the October 31 holiday.
8	The Walking Dead (season 7)		719,418		See #2.
9	List of Black Mirror episodes		711,183		Series 3 of the British show Black Mirror (#14) created by Charlie Brooker (pictured) debuted on October 21.
10	Doctor Strange (film)		684,854		The Marvel superhero film based on the character of Doctor Strange had its Hollywood premiere on October 20, and in the UK and some other markets on October 25. It will debut in the United States on November 4. Benedict Cumberbatch stars in the title role.