Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (October 26 to November 1, 2014)
edit← Last week's report – Next week's report →
Summary: It is, perhaps, ironic that humanity chose the week of Halloween to finally put its fears to bed. Let's face it: 2014 has been a year of tragedies, conflicts, plagues and pain, and eventually something had to break. After 12 weeks, ISIS finally fell out of the top 25, while our more current obsession, Ebola, fell by 50%. Whether we at last came to terms with our limited ability to affect events, shoved those events under the carpet, or just decided to let go and move on, we turned our eye to more positive things, such as sports heroes, hotly anticipated movies, and lifelong learning; two Google doodles appeared on the list for the first time since the beginning of August.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of October 26 to November 1, 2014, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Halloween 
1,780,144 
A personal note: Halloween is my favourite holiday. Not because I'm morbid (though I am), but because it's the one holiday you can't kitsch to death. It's not really surprising that it came top this week. After months of real-life horror, it was time to revel in some that couldn't hurt us. 2 Jonas Salk
1,433,164 
The world's reaction to Ebola has revealed just how distant we have become from devastating disease. In 1952, a polio outbreak in the US killed over three thousand people and permanently disabled another 21,000. That such numbers now seem horrifying is largely due to this man, who developed the vaccine that (for the developed world at least) relegated them to the back shelf of history. Thanks to a Google doodle to celebrate his 100th birthday, many more got to learn that history. Here's hoping it aids the UN's plan to finally send polio the way of smallpox. 3 Happy New Year (2014 film) 
816,053 
Views have nearly doubled this week for this 2014 Bollywood film starring Shahrukh Khan (pictured), which stormed the Indian box office on Diwali weekend and has now grossed an astonishing Rs 3.4 billion ($55 million) worldwide in just 13 days, making it already the 6th highest-grossing Bollywood film of all time. The comedic caper movie tells the story of a motley crew entering a world dance competition to get close to a valuable trove of diamonds. It is difficult to imagine a more Bollywood plot than that. 4 Madison Bumgarner 
753,386 
Speaking as someone from Britain, can I say that guy has the coolest name ever? Anyhoo, this pitcher for the San Francisco Giants sent the Kansas City Royals packing at the World Series final by allowing just two hits in five innings. 5 Ebola virus disease
750,990 
Numbers are down by 50 percent after four straight weeks at number one, which means we may finally be recovering from our collective panic attack. Not that that has had much of an effect on our leaders, as the only news from this outbreak this week (aside of course, from the increasing death toll) has been North Korea banning all foreign tourists and a nurse already cleared of the virus challenging an arbitrary three-week quarantine. Quite the reaction to a virus that has so far killed 10, yes 10, people outside of its three-nation epicentre. 6 Facebook
617,016 
A perennially popular article. 7 Ultron
558,101 
Ultron, a comic book villain in the Marvel Comics family, will be the subject of the 2015 film Avengers: Age of Ultron (#17), and played by James Spader (pictured). A week-early leak of the film's trailer propelled both articles into our Top 25 last week, and they have yet to leave. Marvel cheekily blamed Hydra, a fictional terrorist group in the Marvel universe, for the leak. One could question whether the leak was intentional and has already been added to the resume of some marketing guy at Marvel Studios. 8 The Walking Dead (TV series)
542,553 
The show's fifth season premièred on 12 October. 9 John Gotti 
520,506 
You wouldn't want to be the guy who ran over and killed a Mob boss's son, even accidentally. But someone did, and, he was never heard from or seen again, as Reddit found out this week. 10 1989 (Taylor Swift album)
518,044 
The country/pop singer Taylor Swift released her latest album on October 27, and also removed her singles from Spotify, taking a stand for her earnings. Weirdly though, she didn't remove her singles from YouTube, which charges even less than Spotify and allows pirated content to compete with her legitimate uploads. 11 American Horror Story: Freak Show
481,508 
The fourth season of the American Horror Story series débuted on 8 October. 12 Taylor Swift
471,302 See #10 13 Day of the Dead
465,760 
With its joyful juxtaposition of the merry and the macabre, the Mexican Halloween is becoming ever more popular in its northern neighbour (the land that turned Halloween into a global phenomenon) no doubt aided by the increasing Latino presence there. 14 Niki de Saint Phalle
453,617 
The artist, sculptor and filmmaker famous for her plump female figures called "nanas" got a Google doodle on her would-have-been 84th birthday. 15 Hell in a Cell (2014)
447,069 WWE's latest Pay-per-view pantomime aired on October 26. I've never been entirely clear if people actually "win" these things, but for the record, the declared winner was Seth Rollins. 16 Deaths in 2014 
438,341 
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. 17 Avengers: Age of Ultron
431,014 
It is somewhat odd, given that this is the week Marvel announced the upcoming "Phase 3" of its Cinematic Universe, that viewers are still mainly interested the next instalment of Phase 2. Wonder if we'll see Black Panther and Doctor Strange next week. 18 Gotham (TV series)
431,014 
This televisual reboot of the Batman franchise debuted on 22 September 2014, and is in the Top 25 for a sixth straight week. 19 Life expectancy
414,705 
Reddit noted this week that human life expectancy has increased more in the last 50 years than in the last 200,000. 20 Interstellar (film)
406,735 
Once a passion project for Steven Spielberg, and based on a scientific paper by astrophysicist Kip Thorne, this potentially dense bit of hard scifi has now fallen into the hands of Christopher Nolan, a director with a proven track record of handing difficult concepts to general audiences. Critics, usually kind to Nolan, have been more reserved than usual; the film currently has an RT rating of 72%, the lowest of any Nolan-directed film. How this will affect the box office is anyone's guess. 21 Google
385,329 
Always a fairly popular article. 22 The Flash (2014 TV series)
373,757 
This spinoff from the hit series Arrow marks DC Comics' second attempt to create a TV universe, after the late and much lamented DC Animated Universe. Fourth straight week in the Top 25. 23 Colt McCoy
360,452 
The quarterback for the Washington Redskins led the team to an overtime victory against the Dallas Cowboys on 28 October. 24 Fury (2014 film)
358,992 
This World War II-set action film starring Brad Pitt (pictured) was released on 17 October. It topped the American box office on its opening weekend, and has now grossed over $100 million worldwide. 25 Oscar Taveras
353,796 
The outfielder for the St Louis Cardinals tragically died in a car accident this week, having played major league for just five months, during which he batted a .239 average.
.jpg)
.JPG)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
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.
Specific exclusions this week:
- The Book of Life (2014 film) - A single spammer has been pushing this film for two weeks now
- Thanksgiving: sad but true, this isn't due to premature interest in the upcoming holiday, but to a bunch of mirror sites.