The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (December 27, 2015 to January 2, 2016)[edit]

← Last week's report – Next week's report →

Steven Avery Was Framed By The Police For Murder: This is the shocking premise of Netflix's 10-episode series Making a Murderer (#9) about American prisoner Steven Avery (#4), which is getting widespread attention in the press. Netflix series, which release an entire season at once and thus encourage binge-watching, have tended to rise to the top of this list upon release, but Murderer succeeding as a documentary is rather notable. Aside from this true crime entry, our top entry is again Star Wars: The Force Awakens for a third straight week, as the film seems to break new box office records on a daily basis. Nine of our Top 25 are still Star Wars related this week. Our top 10 also features two high-profile deaths in hard rock musician Lemmy (#2) and American singer Natalie Cole (#9).

As prepared by Milowent, for the week of December 27, 2015 to January 2, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Star Wars: The Force Awakens	3,232,970	First place for the third week running. Down from 4,905,073 views last week, but still high numbers for any weekly #1 article.
2	Lemmy	2,001,844	The front man for the band Motörhead was well known, but I wouldn't have guessed that his death on December 28 (four days after his 70th birthday) would generate two million views. Though my knowledge of the band's songs is limited (their iconic song was 1980's "Ace of Spades"), my favorite tribute song about Motörhead is The Figgs' "Cheap Cassettes".
3	Star Wars	1,803,944	See #1
4	Steven Avery	1,164,616	Avery is an American prisoner who is the subject of the popular new Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer (#9) which was released on December 18. (Episode 1 is available free on YouTube.) Avery served 18 years in prison, from 1985–2003, after being framed by the local police for a sexual assault he plainly did not commit. During his subsequent civil lawsuit for compensation, during a period of explosive depositions, he was charged with the murder of a local photographer, and later convicted. I am in the midst of watching this show and highly recommend it, as does a large swath of the internet. Interestingly, his Wikipedia article was created on November 11, 2005, a few days after his arrest for the murder charge – I suspect a review of the edits to that article probably detail a lot of real time reactions to his case, though the article was only edited a few times in the year before the series was released. Up from #23 last week.
5	Ethan Couch	1,033,151	If you've heard of the "affluenza teen", this is him. After skipping probation, he was found with his mother in Mexico on December 28. (Also, Affluenza is #13 this week.)
6	Natalie Cole	1,000,083	The popular American singer, and daughter of Nat King Cole, died at age 65 on December 31. I doubt she was only half as popular as Lemmy (#2), but the time of her death on New Year's Eve probably influenced the traffic to her article.
7	Daisy Ridley	971,476	The English actress stars in #1 in the role of Rey.
8	The Revenant (2015 film)	929,243	A western thriller movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio (pictured), The Revenant had a Los Angeles debut on December 16; it will expand into a wide release on January 8.
9	Making a Murderer	801,042	See #4. Then go watch it.
10	Dilwale (2015 film)	750,939	This Indian film, including Kajol (pictured) among its starring actors, debuted on December 18. Dilwale grossed around ₹1.5 billion (US$22 million) worldwide in its opening weekend, the third highest of the year for an Indian film.
11	The Hateful Eight	711,590	The latest Quentin Tarantino (picture) thriller was released on Christmas Day.
12	Carrie Fisher	690,471	The actress who played Princess Leia in the first three Star Wars films reprises her role in #1.
13	Affluenza	681,256	See #5. I really dislike this word, though it is creative.
14	List of highest-grossing films	657,165	With #1 rising on this all-time list (without considering inflation), and lots of news coverage about it, its no surprise that this was a popular article.
15	Adam Driver	654,271	The American actor star in #1 in the villain's role of Kylo Ren.
16	Bajirao I	620,175	This Peshwa (Prime Minister) of the Indian Maratha Empire became a topic of interest to Indian English speakers after Bajirao Mastani (see below), a drama documenting his doomed love for his second wife, prohibited due to her Muslim heritage, became an end-of-year hit.
17	Joy (film)	617,008	Up from #25 last week. Released on December 25, the film reunites Jennifer Lawrence (pictured), with her director and costars from The Silver Linings Playbook to tell the story of Joy Mangano (#22), the inventor of the Miracle Mop and Huggable Hangars. The film had its official première in New York City on December 13.
18	Deaths in 2015	616,482	Though a bit higher this week no doubt due to year end viewing, the viewcounts for this article are remarkably constant; fluctuating week to week between 475 and 575 thousand on average, apparently heedless of who actually died.
19	Harrison Ford	615,268	At #19 for the second straight week, with a slight drop from 693,925 views last week. Harrison Ford once claimed he had little interest in reprising his role as Han Solo, but with a little encouragement (and $25 million plus a percentage of the back-end) he did, and thankfully so, because it produced his best-reviewed performance in years.
20	And Then There Were None	605,476	The 1939 mystery novel by Agatha Christie was the subject of a BBC adaptation which ran on BBC One from December 26–28, 2015.
21	Motörhead	591,279	See #2. Other band members announced that the band had ended with Lemmy's death.
22	Joy Mangano	568,759	See #17.
23	Kylo Ren	548,291	The black-masked apprentice Sith Lord is the main villain of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, played by Adam Driver (#15).
24	Star Wars (film)	548,056	See #1. The first movie in the series, released on May 25, 1977, in only about 30 movie theaters.
25	Mark Hamill	538,592	The actor who played Luke Skywalker in the first three Star Wars films reprises his role in #1.

Exclusions[edit]

This list excludes the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we also exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (~2% or less) or almost all mobile views (~95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the talk page if you wish.

Note: If you came here from the Signpost article, please take any discussion of exclusions to this article's talk page.