Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/January 7 to 13, 2018

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Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (January 7 to 13, 2018)[edit]

Prepared with commentary by Igordebraga

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Golden Googles: A Netflix Original: Another year has begun, meaning it's film award season. The 75th Golden Globe Awards were on Sunday, bringing along a few movies and people from the ceremony - the only film on the list that wasn't in the running was the latest Star Wars (#24). The subject of one of the nominees, Tonya Harding, gets a boost from a television special that even brings along the victim of her infamous scheme. And speaking of television, online equivalent Netflix also has a strong presence from people binge-watching The Crown, Black Mirror, and a new release, The End of the F***ing World. Yet the most popular entry of the week is from a Google Doodle, one of three this week. To complete, three holdovers from last week (Bitcoin, Cardi B, and Logan Paul), a victorious American football coach and an expensive association football player.


For the week of January 7 to 13, 2018, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Har Gobind Khorana Start class 2,038,725
A Google Doodle remembered the birthday of this Indian-American chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for research that showed the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids.
2 Tonya Harding B class 1,528,916
Disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding might already be the subject of the film I, Tonya (where she is portrayed by Margot Robbie), but gained another boost as ABC broadcast a special about her, Truth and Lies: The Tonya Harding Story.
3 Oprah Winfrey B class 1,090,853
Oprah won the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes (#22), and gave a powerful speech afterwards, making some wish the words of host Seth Meyers could have some resonance: "In 2011 I told some jokes about our current president at the White House Correspondents' Dinner — jokes about how he was unqualified to be president — and some have said that night convinced him to run. So if that’s true, I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president! You do not have what it takes! And Hanks! Where is Hanks? You will never be vice president! You are too mean and unrelatable. Now we just wait and see."
4 The End of the F***ing World Start class 912,457
For the second time (see #10), Netflix borrowed a series from Channel 4 with this dark comedy-drama, which in spite of the title is not post-apocalyptic, instead following two troubled teenagers imbarking on a road trip across England.
5 Kirk Douglas CB class 790,902
Douglas might be 101, but he appeared at the Golden Globes (#22) with his daughter-in-law Catherine Zeta-Jones to a standing ovation as he presented the Best Screenplay award. Still, some people complained about his presence on Twitter, as an unproven story claims Douglas supposedly raped Natalie Wood when she was just 16.
6 Elizabeth II Featured Article 765,413
"Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl
But she changes from day to day"

Well, maybe not day to day, but Season 3 of The Crown (the reason why the Queen is still strong on this list) will have a new portrayer for Elizabeth, given a timeskip will change her actress from Claire Foy to Olivia Colman.

7 Nancy Kerrigan C class 754,198
Tonya Harding (#2) just can't be dissociated from Kerrigan. To explain why, I'll borrow from Weird Al:

"Once there was this girl who swore
That one day she would be a figure skating champion
And when she finally made it
She saw some other girl who was better
And so she hired some guy to club her in the knee cap"

8 Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon B class 730,573
It says a lot for the interest in The Crown that members of the British royal family are still standing near the top of this list a month after the second season of the show was released. HRH The Princess Margaret, played by Vanessa Kirby, is a significant character in the second season, which includes sequences depicting her relationships with a number of men, including the Earl Snowdon, Antony Armstrong-Jones. Come to think of it, that was probably a spoiler. It's been reported that Helena Bonham Carter is lined up to replace Kirby for the next series, as time moves on.
9 Deaths in 2018 List 720,197
Deaths in 2017 was the only article that never left the Top 25 last year. Looks like 2018's equivalent will do the same. If it does so, can we retire this skull picture?
10 Black Mirror 689,996
Once again, a double-dip for Charlie Brooker (pictured) and his science fiction anthology series that started on Channel 4 and has since moved onto Netflix. People just can't get enough of his views on how technology can screw us over.
11 List of Black Mirror episodes 683,082
12 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Start class 668,439
Martin McDonagh (pictured) writes and directs this black comedy drama film about an angry woman who rents three billboards to call public attention to the unsolved murder of her daughter, which won four Golden Globes (#22), including Best Drama Film.
13 Fearless Nadia Start class 649,555
Showing how big the English-speaking Indian population is, a Google Doodle exclusive to them generated enough views for this list. Australian actress-stuntwoman Mary Ann Evans became one of the first superstars of Indian cinema in the 1930s under the name Fearless Nadia.
14 Tommy Wiseau 625,752
Oh hai Wikipedia. James Franco won a Golden Globe (#22) for portraying the infamous auteur-star of The Room, and brought him along to the stage! While "The Rhythm of the Night" played, no less!
15 Bitcoin 588,547
My mom is struggling to understand how bitcoins work, which just goes to show how the cryptocurrency is not an easy concept even if it's supposedly worth $13.330 a piece. In the meantime, the price continues to float.
16 Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh 560,615
The husband of Elizabeth II (#6), Prince Philip's presence in the list is doubtless another The Crown effect. Matt Smith portrayed the prince consort in the first two seasons and will not return following a timeskip, and while in a previous Peter Morgan production, The Queen, the elderly Philip was played by James Cromwell, expect a more British actor - maybe Peter Capaldi, to keep the Doctor Who casting?
17 Nick Saban C class 557,219
College football coach Saban broke an NCAA record by winning his sixth title on the 2018 National Championship with the University of Alabama.
18 Philippe Coutinho C class 556,240
From American football to the real one, straight from Brasil-sil-sil-sil! Striker Coutinho was purchased by Barcelona from Liverpool for €160million, making him the second most expensive player ever.
19 Cardi B 552,763 Rapper Belcalis Almanzar, aka Cardi B, features on Bruno Mars's latest single, a remix of his 2016 song "Finesse", which was released on January 4.
20 Zhou Youguang C class 539,722 Google for the third time! This time celebrating this Chinese man best known for creating the system that allows writing Mandarin Chinese in Roman script (to the eternal thanks of those that can read "Zhou Youguang" but not "周有光"), and died just last year at the age of 111.
21 The Shape of Water (film) 529,091 “I have to admit, when I first heard it was a movie about a naive young woman falling in love with a disgusting sea creature, I thought, Man, not another Woody Allen movie. It's like Manhattan, in water.” - Golden Globes (#22) host Seth Meyers. In said ceremony, Guillermo del Toro (pictured) won Best Director, so maybe he can follow best friends Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu into getting an Oscar too.
22 75th Golden Globe Awards 525,388
Here's the main view booster of the week. Along with awarding movies such as #12 and #21, there were plenty of attacks on sexual harrassers (Seth Meyers opened his monologue right away with "Good evening ladies and remaining gentlemen!") and Donald Trump ("And we’re all here tonight courtesy of the Hollywood Foreign Press. Yeah, give it up for the Hollywood Foreign Press. A string of three words that could not have been better designed to infuriate our president. The only name that could make him angrier would be the Hillary Mexico Salad Association.").
23 The Greatest Showman 512,713
Hugh Jackman (pictured) stars in this musical about circus founder P. T. Barnum. In spite of mixed reviews criticising the artistic licence taken in the storytelling, The Greatest Showman is attracting a steady audience: even if the film never rose above 4th in the American box office (it fell to 5th this weekend), it is poised to surpass $100 million next week.
24 Star Wars: The Last Jedi 503,710
Episode VIII of Star Wars has now surpassed Beauty and the Beast as the highest-grossing film of 2017 and tenth biggest ever. And this despite being so bleak that I felt Rogue One was more uplifting - and that one has everyone on the poster not named Darth Vader dying!
25 Logan Paul 499,925
Donald Trump continued his mean streak, with the highlight being a complaint about America receiving immigrants from "shithole countries". Yet he finished at #26, missing the list because of a vlogger who after a moment of even worse taste (a video where he found a recently deceased hanged corpse in a Japanese forest) is facing fallout from both YouTube and general audiences.


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 exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% 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.