The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (May 29 to June 4, 2016)

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Another One With Sports: Sports seemed to dominate the pop culture mishmash of the chart this week, with the death of Muhammad Ali leading the chart, basketball star Stephen Curry at #6, and two football topics UEFA Euro 2016 (#7) and Copa América Centenario (#9) also placing in the Top 10. But Game of Thrones also had two slots in the Top 10 as well, and probably will until their season finale. Sadly though, the mighty AFC Wimbledon who I have mentioned before, and who amazingly did get promoted to the English Football League One last week, still failed to get near the Top 25. But their day is coming, I just know it.

As prepared by Milowent, for the week of May 29 to June 4, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Muhammad Ali	4,425,310	There was no question that the death of the iconic and unique American boxer would be a huge news story. He had been in very poor health more recently, and news reports in America that he was seriously ill quickly became news of his death. For purposes of this Report, the timing of his death did raise the question of whether it occurred too late to lead the chart (which runs from 0:00 UTC Sunday to 23:59 the following Saturday each week), but it did not. Almost all of 4.4 million views this article received occurred on June 4, the last reporting day of this Report.
2	X-Men: Apocalypse	1,086,685	Hopes were high for this movie after the rapturous critical and commercial reception given to Bryan Singer's previous X-Men film, Days of Future Past; unfortunately the reviews for the followup have been largely negative, with the film struggling to reach a 60% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet, this is its third week in the top 2 (it was #1 last week), and fourth week in the top 10.
3	Game of Thrones	873,355	The latest season of this eternally popular TV series premiered on HBO on 24 April. And with last week's shock revelation, people turned to Wikipedia. With three episodes left in this season, we can expect it stay up on the chart.
4	Game of Thrones (season 6)	836,979	See #3
5	Memorial Day	762,385	The last Monday in May (which was May 30 this year), the day that the United States chose to honour its war dead, is perhaps better known as the traditional beginning of US summer vacation, and is thus eagerly anticipated by millions of people too young to serve but old enough to stand in line for action movies.
6	Stephen Curry	735,356	Curry's basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, are now in the 2016 NBA Finals.
7	UEFA Euro 2016	671,655	The quadrennial international football event kicks off in France on June 10.
8	Deaths in 2016	628,824	The annual list of deaths, always a fairly consistent visitor to this list, is often in the Top 10 this year. The views of this article are remarkably consistent on a day-to-day basis, with close to 100,000 views a day. Views went up slightly with the news of the death of Muhammad Ali (#1) on June 4, to 125,826 views for that day. When Prince died, views did substantially jump to 275K for one day (April 21). But substantial jumps like that are not driving the solid regular popularity of the article, which makes it a regular part of the Top 25.
9	Copa América Centenario	614,036	The 45th edition of the Copa América football tournament is being held in the United States this year, the first time the competition has been held outside its South America territory, and began on June 3. This horde of non-Americans crossing the southern border generated an Argentinian advertisement lampooning Donald Trump.
10	Lotte Reiniger	591,857	A Google Doodle/ on June 2 celebrated the birth (in 1899) of German film director Lotte Reiniger, a pioneer in animation, and best known for silhouette animation. Her film The Adventures of Prince Achmed was released in 1926, over ten years before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
11	Captain America: Civil War	524,612	Down from #3.
12	Amber Heard	519,753	Down from #6 last week, based on continuing celebrity news of Heard's acrimonious divorce from Johnny Depp.
13	Bicycle Race	471,848	Reddit learned a fun fact about this song by Queen.
14	X-Men (film series)	457,101	The ever-more convoluted film series looks safe for now, and, thanks to the rather boring but still perplexing post-credits tease, people want to know what happens next.
15	Hess triangle	450,342	This has got to be Reddit as well (and it is), as it is exactly the kind of quirky thing that doesn't seem quite as quirky when you've been doing this list for a few years and see the formula for the type of "quirky" thing that draws attention on Reddit. Someone could make a book of the 1,000 quirkiest things that will sell on Reddit, and keep recycling them over time. In fact that book may already exist but be a huge secret. A quirky secret that would do very well on Reddit.
16	Johnny Depp	448,368	Last week Depp trailed Amber Heard (#12) by only one slot. The divorce is making them grow apart.
17	List of Game of Thrones episodes	445,027	See #3, #4. Part of the beauty of Wikipedia is the ability to either get a surface understanding of a subject, or stick around and lose entire days of your life in a quest for knowledge.
18	Donald Trump	418,524	Down about 22,000 views from last week. Trump's position in this list is likely secure at least until the convention, but the numbers keep falling, despite a seemingly endless stream of controversy surrounding him.
19	List of Bollywood films of 2016	416,411	Generally a popular yearly list article, often slightly below the Top 25.
20	Marilyn Monroe	406,172	The American actress and model would have turned 90 on June 1 if she was still alive (and not dead for the past 53 years).
21	Warcraft (film)	392,742	This American fantasy film directed by Duncan Jones (pictured) is set for release in the United States on June 10.
22	Klay Thompson	735,356	A teammate of #6 on the Golden State Warriors.
23	Garbiñe Muguruza	392,289	This tennis player won the 2016 French Open – Women's Singles title last week.
24	Emilia Clarke	388,926	Holding steady for a second week. A.k.a Game of Thrones' Daenerys Targaryen, she has always been the breakout star of the show, which might explain why she's on the list this week (again), given that the Mother of Dragons had barely a line in the actual episode. Of course, she had her new film Me Before You (#29) which came out on June 3.
25	Razak Khan	387,265	This Hindi film actor died on June 1.

Exclusions

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 (~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. 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.