The Top 25 Report
Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (October 9 to 15, 2016)
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Un-Presidential Politics: The U.S. Presidential election is dominating 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.
As prepared by Milowent, for the week of October 9 to 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 quite a few months for the cousin of Jeb and Dubya. First he was blasted for failing to catch Ryan Lochte out on his preschool lying, and then he was seen giggling along as Donald Trump gleefully recounted how often he got away with sexual molestation. For this, he is gifted with being wedged between the candidates for U.S. President this week. 3 Hillary Clinton 
1,009,711 
That Billy Bush got more views than Clinton tells you the 2005 videotape of Trump and Bush joking about molestation of women 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 revere him (he is already being called "the Great") but his son, the crown prince Vajiralongkorn (see #12), is generally seen as a wastrel and a buffoon, 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, and thus one 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 and Donald Trump both probably did terrible stuff with women. But there are three primary differences between the two: the way society viewed these things in 1992, when Bill Clinton was first elected president, has changed slowly for the better over the past 24 years. Second, Bill Clinton is not running for president. Three, Bill doesn't say things like "no one treats women better than me." 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. 11 Deaths in 2016 
612,525 
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. 12 Vajiralongkorn
589,140 
The crown prince of Thailand, expected to succeed #4. 13 No Mercy (2016) 554,840 
October 9 American wrestling event. Maryse Ouellet (pictured) appears on the promo card and was involved in spraying someone with pepper spray which was totally not scripted I am sure. 14 Melania Trump
528,708 
Spouse of #1. 15 Thomas Mikal Ford
515,071 American actor who died on October 12 at age 52 of an aneurysm. 16 Bill Clinton sexual misconduct allegations
513,465 Views peaked on October 10, the day after the second U.S. presidential debate. I was not aware we had a specific article on this, though it is certainly a notable series of events. Trump brought a number of Clinton's alleged victims to the second debate and apparently tried to engineer it so that they would be paraded across the stage and sit in the Trump family box, and thus in the handshake line. My view is that Clinton clearly did inappropriate things with many women in his past, but only someone like Trump with his own bad history would actually seek to exploit women in this way, and to try to make the debate into a circus instead of a discussion of policy and proposals and leadership abilities. 17 Marilyn Monroe
501,597 
As learned in a Reddit thread this week, when Marilyn converted to Judaism after marrying Arthur Miller, Egypt banned all her films. 18 Ivanka Trump
491,210 
Daughter of #1. 19 Pablo Escobar 
484,978 
Narcos is back on your television screens, meaning Don Pablo is back on the list for another week. 20 American Horror Story: Roanoke
483,157 
The sixth season of American Horror Story debuted on September 14. It invokes the story of England's failed attempt to establish a colony in America in the 1580s, where by 1590 all inhabitants had disappeared and could not be located. The only clue left behind by the "lost colony" was the word "CROATOAN" carved into a post. 21 Pansexuality
483,117 
This week, pop singer Miley Cyrus revealed that her first sexual experience was with a girl, and that she is uncertain about her sexuality and gender, preferring to describe herself as pansexual. 22 Queen Victoria
475,317 
The British television show Victoria, starring former Doctor Who companion Jenna Coleman in the title role, drew attention to its subject again. 23 Anderson Cooper
472,223 
Cooper was one of the two moderators at the second U.S. presidential debate. Though they did a rather poor showing on the very difficult job of controlling the candidates, Cooper might go down in history for taking down Donald Trump's candidacy for good. Cooper flatly stated (correctly) that the behavior Donald Trump bragged about in the 2005 audiotape released a few days prior was sexual assault, and asked if Trump did engage in the behavior he had said he did. Anyone who knows Trump well at this point would know he would flatly deny it, and this pushed a stream of women to come forward in the days following the debate to say they had been sexually assaulted in different ways by Trump. 24 UFC 204 465,322 
A UFC event held in Manchester, England on October 8. Dan Henderson (pictured) was among the winners. 25 United States presidential election, 2016
452,719 
Is it over yet? NO! Not until November 8.
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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. Since WP:5000 and WMF Topviews use different exclusion algorithms, articles that appear in one but not the other can also safely be excluded as false. 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.