Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (November 30 to December 6, 2014)

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Summary: Dead black men and science-fiction are the stark contrasts which fill the Top 25 this week. The grand jury decision not to indict after the death of Eric Garner (#1) recently followed a similar decision in the shooting of Michael Brown (#5), and remain top news stories in the United States. A future movie based on the Suicide Squad (#2) comic book team, the future Star Wars: The Force Awakens (#6), and current Interstellar (#7), not to mention the continuing popularity of the science-but-not-fiction Stephen Hawking (#4) represent the bulk of the Top 10. And in the greater Top 25 we see Terminator Genisys at #18, The Maze Runner at #22, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 at #24, and the non-fictional spacecraft Orion at #25. On the whole, escapism dominates over reality for another week.

As prepared by Milowent, for the week of November 30 to December 6, 2014, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Notes
1	Death of Eric Garner		1,328,750	On December 3, a grand jury decided not to indict New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in connection with the death of Eric Garner, who died in Tompkinsville, Staten Island on July 19 after being put in a chokehold. A video of the event went viral shortly after that event. The grand jury's decision has caused public outcry, and the U.S. Justice Department has announced a separate civil rights investigation into Garner's death. Between this and the shooting of Michael Brown (#1 last week, #5 this week), police procedure in the United States (especially black citizens) has become a subject of widespread discussion.
2	Suicide Squad		727,440	The cast of the upcoming 2016 film of the same name about this comics franchise was announced this week, including Will Smith as Deadshot, Jared Leto as the Joker, Margot Robbie (pictured) as Harley Quinn, Tom Hardy as Rick Flag, Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang, and Cara Delevingne, who is currently filming Paper Towns, as Enchantress.
3	Facebook		724,670	A perennially popular article, and a jump from 611,598 views last week puts it at #3 this week, its highest placing since it also hit #3 the week of November 2 to 8. To find a week where Facebook doesn't appear on the Top 25, you have to go all the way back to the week of June 15 to 21, when the World Cup was dominating the chart.
4	Stephen Hawking		704,737	The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon got a boost with the release of a biopic, The Theory of Everything, in the United States on November 7. His article has remained popular since, this being his fifth straight weekly appearance.
5	Shooting of Michael Brown		611,311	The November 24 decision by the grand jury not to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager from Ferguson, Missouri, led not only to further unrest but to Brown's death becoming the most sought-after topic on Wikipedia last week. This week the article dropped from 2.5 million views to just over 600 thousand.
6	Star Wars: The Force Awakens		610,664	After the mess George Lucas made of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, it's fair to say fans are more than a little equivocal about whatever new owners Disney and admitted Star Wars geek J. J. Abrams have planned to restore the series' reputation. Though many feel the film's title itself is far from promising and alternate humorous titles have abounded, hope springs eternal and this article remains popular.
7	Interstellar (film)		606,266	As the above interest in Stephen Hawking shows, movies that win at the box office are seldom the ones that get the most Wikipedia views; rather it is the amount of debate and discussion those movies trigger that seems to be the main driver of Wikipedia interest. Case in point: Interstellar's respectable $147 million domestic box office has paled next to that of Big Hero 6, which opened opposite it, and even The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, which opened two weeks after it. And yet, the debates and questions it raised, both scientific and over its own quality, have meant that this film's article has remained in the top 10 for weeks.
8	Phillip Hughes		593,302	One of the best cricketers in Australia's modern history, at the age of 20, Phillip Hughes scored centuries in both innings at a test match, the youngest player ever to do so. Sadly, he died last week after being hit on the neck by a cricket ball.
9	The Walking Dead (TV series)		545,851	The show's fifth season premièred on 12 October, and the series article has remained popular since that time.
10	Deaths in 2014		491,209	The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. Deaths this week included Bangladeshi painter Qayyum Chowdhury (November 30) (pictured), Greek-American epidemiologist and oncologist Dimitrios Trichopoulos (December 1); British wheelchair basketball player Josie Cichockyj (December 2); Mexican Supreme Court Justice Sergio Armando Valls (December 3); American songwriter Bob Montgomery (December 4); American photographer Arthur Leipzig (December 5); and Ralph H. Baer, often called "the father of videogames" (December 6)
11	The Walking Dead (season 5)	N/A	445,624	See #9
12	Allison Williams (actress)		441,740	The internet got excited last week that this actress' appearance as the title character in the live-television special Peter Pan Live! on December 4 would deliver Sharknado-like badness. However, it apparently turned out pretty well, and the daughter of news anchor Brian Williams once again proved her own merit.
13	Gotham (TV series)		439,276	This televisual reboot of the Batman franchise debuted on September 22, 2014, and has remained a fixture in the Top 25 ever since.
14	Anna Freud		413,255	A Google Doodle celebrated the psychoanalyst's 119th birthday on December 3. Mobile views were only 15.51%, which is no surprise, as lower mobile views are usually recorded for Google Doodle-based popularity.
15	Google		411,181	Always a fairly popular article.
16	Jimmy Bullard		406,652	This English footballer retired in 2012 from the Milton Keynes Dons, but he returned to British TV screens in November as a contestant on I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! (UK series 14). He was eliminated from the show on December 1, which was eventually won by Superbike racer Carl Fogarty, another "celebrity" this writer has never heard of.
17	Ariana Grande		405,734	Interest in the former Nickelodeon star remains high. Views rose a bit around December 3, perhaps because the day prior she took the stage at London's Earls Court for the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show and got grazed by an errant model's fake huge wing. Which was apparently a complete non-event, except it generated some good pics, and there was really nothing substantive to write about either Arianna Grande or this event.
18	Terminator Genisys	N/A	404,093	The first trailer to this fifth installment in the Terminator series, due to be released in July 2015, debuted this week. Arnold Schwarzenegger will once again reprise his titular role in the film. A few months ago, it was announced that additional movies in the series would be released in 2017 and 2018.
19	The Flash (2014 TV series)		396,205	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. A return to the Top 25.
20	List of Arrow episodes	N/A	388,698	Weekly view spikes in this article track the release of each episode of the current season.
21	Sons of Anarchy		364,562	The seventh season of the American crime drama television series ends on December 9. Daily views spike the day after each weekly episode, but those spikes have been growing as the season progresses. This is the show's first appearance on the Top 25 since September 2013. Katey Sagal (pictured) is among the primary cast members, and the wife of the show's creator Kurt Sutter.
22	The Maze Runner		359,957	The film based on this 2009 novel by James Dashner (pictured at left) was released in the United States on 19 September 2014. This article previously appeared for one week in the Top 25 in September, and regained some popularity in late-November with an impending DVD release and probably some online pirating as well.
23	United States		355,664	While not often in the top 25, it is usually among the most popular articles on an annual basis.
24	The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1		346,860	The third of four planned movies made from The Hunger Games trilogy (starring Jennifer Lawrence, left) has now made over $550 million worldwide.
25	Orion (spacecraft)		345,515	NASA's new spacecraft had its debut unmanned test flight on December 5, 2014, a flight lasting 4 hours and 24 minutes and two orbits of the Earth. The craft's first manned mission is not expected until 2021 at the earliest.

Just missing the list: American Horror Story: Freak Show (#26), Wikipedia (#27), Chespirito (Mexican comedian who died on November 28); #28, boxer Hasim Rahman (#29) and List of Bollywood films of 2014 (#30)

Notes from the Top 5000: 80 articles from the raw Top 5000 exceeded over 250,000 views this week, the last being Chernobyl disaster (#80, 250,954 views); 476 articles cracked 100,000 views, ending with Colombian house music DJ Lupe Fuentes (#476, 100,259 views); Recent American Dancing with the Stars winner Alfonso Ribeiro (#1750) was last to top 50,000 as he slides out of the limelight again; and there was a three-way tie for last place (#4998) with Ancient Rome, Mississippi River, and Shirley Bassey each with 27,377 views. The average article in the Top 5000 this week had 41.7% mobile views.

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 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.

Specific exclusions this week:

Advent wreath. 3.63% mobile views on 727,204 total views, with a large spike on Nov 30 and Dec 1 followed by a cliff-like dropoff, a strong indicator of non-human views.
Ectopic pregnancy. 3.15% mobile views on 404,593 total views, a one-day spike on only Dec 3 without explanation.

Note: If you came here from the Signpost article, please take any discussion of exclusions to this article's talk page.