Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (July 7 to 13 2013)[edit]

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Summary: An eclectic mix this week; snooping aliens, tennis stars and flying Sikhs jostled for attention with oceanic pigs, Ultimate Fighting Champions and historic bikinis. With the northern summer putting the breaks on non-cinematic pop-culture, other topics took hold, and this week features a swarm of new entries.

For the week of July 7 to 13, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:

Rank	Last	Wks	Article	Class	Views	Notes
1	1	4	Yahoo!		1,663,622	The page's 23-day, Devil's Tower-esque spike finally came to an end on July 11, leaving the questions it raised unanswered. Was it honest interest in a moribund company in the process of reinvention? Or did said company have some slight hand its popularity? We may never know.
2	-	-	Roswell UFO incident		1,127,165	In one of the more predictable Wikibumps in history, a Google Doodle/video game to celebrate the 66th anniversary of this weather balloon - sorry, unidentified object crashing in Roswell, New Mexico led to a massive spike in views.
3	-	-	Shooting of Trayvon Martin		930,506	The debate over George Zimmerman's shooting of unarmed Trayvon Martin in February 2012, and its relevance to race relations in America and the validity of "stand your ground" laws, reached its climax on July 13 when a jury found Zimmerman not guilty of either murder or manslaughter.
4	-	-	Andy Murray		838,002	Becoming the first British man (but not first British person, certain UK newspapers) to win the home tournament of Wimbledon in 77 years doesn't apparently qualify you for top seed in Wikipedia views.
5	8	27	Facebook		775,361	A perennially popular article.
6	-	-	Pacific Rim (film)		672,348	Guillermo del Toro's anime-inspired monsters vs. robots slugfest came in third over the weekend, losing to Despicable Me 2 and, ahem, Grown Ups 2, but it remained the biggest talking point among Wikipedian cineastes.
7	-	-	History of the bikini		664,579	What, I wonder, is more telling of human nature? That a Reddit thread on this page could trigger over 650,000 Wikipedia views or that it is already a Good Article? It's nice to see our collective minds inspired by so relevant and informative a subject.
8	-	-	Big Major Cay	Unassessed	657,617	This beach on an uninhabited island in the Bahamas where wild pigs swim in the ocean apparently began its trip around the Internet on a blog post over at treehugger.com, and from there spread from person to person simply because, well, they thought it was kinda cool.
9	17	37	Deaths in 2013	List	414,797	The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article.
10	-	-	Asiana Airlines Flight 214		398,345	The Boeing 777 crashed on arrival at San Francisco International Airport on July 6 after a trans-Pacific flight from Seoul. Plane crashes are inherently dramatic, and so always garner public interest; however thankfully casualties so far have been relatively light, with only three deaths and nine severe injuries out of the 307 people on board.
11	-	-	Jackie Coogan		382,718	The onetime child actor who would go on to play Uncle Fester in The Addams Family got a Reddit thread on July 12 about his role in the passing of the California Child Actor's Bill, protecting the earnings of child actors from unscrupulous parents.
12	-	-	Ramadan		379,864	The Muslim holy month of fasting began on the July 10 and runs til August 9.
13	-	-	Milkha Singh		377,436	"The Flying Sikh", the record-breaking track and fielder who represented India in three Olympic Games, became a topic of interest after his biopic, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, was released on July 12. Singh sold the rights for ₹1 but insisted a share of the profits be given to a charitable trust.
14	9	4	Edward Snowden		371,316	The story of the international cause célèbre who blew the whistle on the NSA's domestic spying program becomes more gripping by the day. Denied a passport by the US government, he presumably remains trapped in Terminal E of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, possibly seeking asylum in Venezuela. Polls suggest Americans are still fairly divided on whether to treat this man as a hero or a traitor, which will only stimulate more debate and, likely, more Wikipedia views in future.
15	-	36	YouTube		356,350	Another perennially popular article
16	19	8	List of Bollywood films of 2013	List	349,942	Newly established staple of the top 25.
17	18	2	Magna Carta... Holy Grail		343,629	The latest album from rapper Jay-Z was released on July 4
18	-	-	UFC 162		327,563	The Ultimate Fighting Middleweight Championship between title-holder Anderson Silva and undefeated contender Chris Weidman was held on July 6 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. Weidman knocked Silva out, but Silva got more Wikipedia views, so there's that.
19	-	4	Attack on Titan		319,216	This anime series, despite ending in June and never having been released in the West, has attained cult status in the Nerdisphere. Interest may have recently been spiked by a series of badly-translated death threats against the show's creator, supposedly for basing a character on the series on a General in the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII. Or maybe because it's about giant monsters and Pacific Rim just came out.
20	-	-	Anderson Silva		317,675	Life's lesson learned: get knocked out in the second round, and Wikipedia will still love you.
21	15	6	Man of Steel (film)		309,237	The modern reworking of the Superman mythos has been a pretty strong success, having grossed nearly $620 million worldwide as of July 15
22	-	2	IPv6		307,465	This issue has reappeared in the top 25, after hovering below it for some time. It is something of a crisis, though not one that is necessarily apparent. It may come as a surprise to some, but the Internet is, for lack of a better word, full. Every computer online is assigned a specific address, made up of a sequence of numbers, that allows other computers to contact it over the Internet. The original number sequence, known as IPv4, is currently the norm for ~99% of online computers. It allows for a maximum of about 4.3 billion addresses; a number that maxed out in January 2011. The long-term plan is to migrate over to IPv6, which allows for 3x10³⁸ addresses; however, since this would require a massive software and even hardware upgrade, many companies are reluctant to undertake it. Until now we've been stalling for time by harvesting abandoned addresses and re-allocating them, a decidedly short-term measure.
23	-	18	Game of Thrones		306,835	People just can't get enough of this show, even when it hasn't been on air for a month.
24	-	25	Google		304,174	A perennially popular article.
25	-	-	Despicable Me 2		302,049	Easily the most popular movie out right now, having grossed nearly $500 million worldwide in less than two weeks.

This list is derived from the WP:5000 report. It excludes the Wikipedia main page (and "wiki"), non-article pages, and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Please feel free to discuss any removal on the talk page if you wish. Standard removals this week include:

- Cat anatomy: A spammer with a sense of humour? Lazy med students looking for quick info on cat dissections? Or a REALLY confused adware bot for Friskies? The debate still rages as to why this article continues to rank so highly.
- G: This, or alternately G-force, frequently appears in the top 25. It is probably due to people typing "G" for "Google" in Google Chrome's search bar and hastily clicking "enter".
- Alive/Alive!: Links to disambigs with no apparent reason for being.
- MONO (Shigeo Tamaru Album) and Chikako Watanabe: Articles related to the Japanese band NaNa have been popping into the Top 25 for weeks with no determined rationale. There may be one. We haven't found it.

Specific removals this week (those for whom no explanation for their popularity could be found):

- That's Entertainment! III: MGM's documentary retrospective got a massive surge of views on July 12, for no apparent reason.
- Equilibrium (film): Why this fairly obscure 2002 cult dystopian scifi flick would get a sudden burst of views on July 10-11 is not clear.

Number of views needed to reach Top 25 this week: 302,049. Last week: 331,624
Almosts: The Lone Ranger (2013 film) (301,775 views); Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (290,013 views); World War II (287,907 views)

The revision of WP:5000 containing the data used to create this list.