Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (December 28, 2014 to January 3, 2015)[edit]

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Summary: We end 2014 and start 2015 with the normal array of year-end activities, including movie watching with Bollywood film PK (#1) topping the list, followed by The Interview (#2), 2014 in film (#10), and five other films in the rest of the Top 25, plus a number of articles about the subjects of these films. We celebrated the New Year by singing "Auld Lang Syne" (#11), or perhaps watching Adam Lambert (#9) perform with Queen. But we could not avoid a final tragedy with the crash of Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 on December 28.

As prepared by Milowent, for the week of December 28, 2014 to January 3, 2015, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Notes
1	PK (film)		1,007,428	About thirty thousand fewer views than last week, when it stood at #3, this Bollywood film, starring Aamir Khan and Anushka Sharma, tops the chart this week. Released on December 19, it has already become the highest grossing Bollywood film of all time, with a worldwide box office of over US$94 million. It is also the first Bollywood film to ever top this report.
2	The Interview (2014 film)		824,917	Down from 1.2 million views and #1 last week. See past reports for the whole sordid history of this film, which, as of January 4, 2015, had earned more than $31 million from online sales and rentals.
3	Chris Kyle		724,445	This American sniper, whose life was the subject of the appropriately named Clint Eastwood-directed film American Sniper, which went into wide release on Christmas Day, is considered the most lethal in US military history, with 160 confirmed kills. Unfortunately, he was murdered last year by a PTSD-afflicted veteran whom he had taken to a shooting range. Before he died, he had claimed that he had once punched former wrestler and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura in 2006 for badmouthing U.S. President Bush and the military. Ventura sued him for defamation, eventually getting a $1.8 million jury award. In December, Ventura filed a new lawsuit directly against HarperCollins, who published Kyle's book, called, naturally, American Sniper.
4	Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501		704,645	Unfortunately we could not end 2014 without yet another major passenger aircraft crash. On December 28, 2014, this flight crashed in bad weather while en route to Singapore, killing all 155 passengers and 7 crew on board.
5	Jim Harbaugh		684,677	Jim Harbaugh is an American football coach. After serving as the head coach of the professional San Francisco 49ers from 2011-2014, he was named the new head coach of the University of Michigan.
6	AirAsia		646,448	See #4
7	Malaysia Airlines Flight 370		619,770	The crash of Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 (#4) understandably caused readers to once again ask "did they ever find that other plane?" The answer is no. An "underwater search" that began in October is not scheduled to be completed until around May, so it could be quite some time.
8	Stephen Hawking		598,974	The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon makes his ninth straight appearance in the Top 25 this week, thanks in large part to his biopic, The Theory of Everything, which opened in the United States on November 7.
9	Adam Lambert		544,868	Lambert is an American singer who was the runner up in the eighth season of American Idol in 2009. He performed a New Year's Eve concert in London with Queen (see Queen & Adam Lambert Rock Big Ben Live), which proved quite popular.
10	2014 in film	N/A	539,382	No doubt this was popular among readers wishing to see what the most popular movies were of the year. Transformers: Age of Extinction starring Mark Wahlberg (pictured) was the highest-grossing film of the year, making over $1.08 billion, which puts it at number 10 on the all-time list.
11	"Auld Lang Syne"		534,492	We welcome 2015. Just as they do every year, readers rushed to the article on Robbie Burns's ode to long-forgotten friendships, either to learn its history or, equally likely, to finally learn all the lyrics in time for New Year's.
12	American Sniper (film)		520,423	Clint Eastwood's latest directorial effort was released on Christmas Day. Up from 381,786 (#17) last week.
13	Facebook		513,079	A perennially popular article.
14	Deaths in 2014		469,027	The viewing figures for this article have been remarkably constant; fluctuating week to week between 450 and 550,000, apparently heedless of who actually died. But next week it will presumably be replaced by Deaths in 2015, as the 2014 article has already been redirected to Lists of deaths by year. The editors that maintain these articles and shift them to the proper places as time passes should be lauded for their dedication.
15	Donna Douglas		468,674	This American actress best known for her role as Elly May Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–1971) died on January 1, 2015 of pancreatic cancer.
16	The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies		461,507	The final installment of The Hobbit film series debuted in New Zealand on December 11, and the United States on December 17.
17	John Eleuthère du Pont		450,170	Du Pont is the subject of the 2014 film Foxcatcher, in which he is portrayed by Steve Carell.
18	Louis Zamperini		448,387	There are some people who, merely by existing, pose the question "So what have you done today?" to the rest of the world. After qualifying for the 1936 Berlin Olympics (and awkwardly earning the praise of Adolf Hitler) Louis Zamperini fought in the Pacific theatre of World War II, during which he survived 47 days adrift on a raft by drinking rainwater and eating captured albatrosses, only to be captured by the Japanese upon finally reaching land in the Marshall Islands and spend two years in a Japanese POW camp, where he was brutally mistreated by his captors. But he survived it all and only died this year. His is a life of which inspirational biopics are made, and now one is, the Angelina Jolie-directed Unbroken.
19	Kim Jong-un		448,096	North Korea's rotund princeling has risen to notice on the back of the controversy surrounding The Interview (see #2), which features a plot to assassinate him. Although he has yet to match his father as a giant in the annals of scary eccentricity, he's already showing signs of being a chip off the old block: like his dad, he's an avid fan of both luxury goods and basketball, and has invited similarly odd basketball star Dennis Rodman to his private island twice. He's also apparently fond of purges; several of his closest aides and confidants have mysteriously disappeared in the last two years.
20	Foxcatcher		435,877	This film is about John Eleuthère du Pont's (#16) efforts in hiring the Schultz brothers to help train US wrestling and swimming Olympians, and du Pont's subsequent murder of David Schultz. It been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture.
21	List of highest-grossing Bollywood films	N/A	435,442	The appearance of PK (film) (#1) at #1 on this list, unseating 2013's Dhoom 3, no doubt drew some attention.
22	Alan Turing		427,866	The movie The Imitation Game, inspired by Turing's life, has been a critical and commercial success.
23	Unbroken (film)		422,632	Angelina Jolie's second directorial effort (a biopic of Louis Zamperini, see #18) premièred in December.
24	Taylor Swift		418,973	Regularly a quite popular article these days, the country/pop singer performed on American television on New Year's Eve.
25	Gone Girl (film)		399,348	For some reason, views for this article spiked on December 13 and have remained high ever since, possibly due to Oscar buzz, though it might have something to do with a GIF of Ben Affleck's penis (a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot from the film) going viral on the web at around that time. In any event, it remains in the Top 25 for another week.

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.

Specific exclusions this week:

Alprazolam: 3.38% mobile views

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