Top 25 Report: Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (December 21 to 27, 2014)[edit]

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Summary: Christmas spirit (or, more accurately, holiday spirit) is much more in evidence this year than last, with nine slots either directly or indirectly related to the season. Holidays of every stripe, from Christmas to Festivus to Kwanzaa, were given their time in the cold winter sun, and even a redirect received some festive attention, thanks to a Google Doodle. The other theme this week was movies (which are really just another aspect of the Christmas season) with ten slots about movies or people who were the topic of movies.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of December 21 to 27, 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	The Interview (2014 film)		1,179,404	So, the story goes that this typically absurd American male comedy film starring Seth Rogen (pictured) and James Franco, which lampoons a fictional plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, led to the November 2014 Sony Pictures Entertainment hack, and then subsequent internet threats to unleash "September the eleventh" levels of violence if the movie was released, which led movie theater chains to refuse to screen the film, which led Sony to pull the movie's release altogether, a reaction which a cybersecurity expert called "beyond the realm of stupid." (There's a reason you're never supposed to negotiate with terrorists; doing so is handing the fox the key to your chicken coop.) North Korea denied the hack, and saw its own flimsy internet connections flame out on December 22. On December 23, Sony announced the movie would now get a "limited release" on December 25, and on December 24, released the film online. The online release generated an "opening weekend" gross of $15 million, with two million downloads in the first three days, which goes to show that: a) it is possible to keep people safe without conceding to those who threaten them; b) controversy is free advertising and c) movie theatres are dead.
2	Boxing Day		1,052,836	And, just like last year, the most queried element of the holiday season is not Christmas, but its less-celebrated addendum. Perhaps Americans remain puzzled over why their Commonwealth cousins get an extra day of Christmas each year, and what on Earth the Nativity has to do with pugilism (to be fair, no one really knows how Boxing Day got its name, and any stories you hear are pretty much stabs in the dark).
3	PK (film)		1,043,790	This Bollywood film starring Aamir Khan debuted on December 19. The Indian press seems to have liked it, with Bollywood Hungama calling it "a solid entertainer that will surely entertain the masses and classes alike", and reviewer Subhash K. Jha giving it 4 out of 5 stars, saying "'PK' is a film designed to warm the cockles of the heart." The plot revolves around the arrival a human-looking alien on earth who needs to recover a stolen piece of his equipment, and includes satire regarding the phenomenon Indian "godmen". The film grossed about US $25 million in its opening weekend and, in its first 11 days has already become the second-highest grossing Bollywood film of all time, with a worldwide box office of Rs4.34 billion ($68 million).
4	'Tis the Season	disambig	883,524	It's not often a Google Doodle sends nearly a million people to a disambig, but hey, at least it shows some Christmas cheer.
5	Joe Cocker		880,938	The raw-voiced soul rocker from Sheffield, whose notoriously spasmodic stage gyrations were affectionately mocked by John Belushi on Saturday Night Live, died this week at the age of 70. While a songwriter in his own right, he was mostly famous for his interpretations of others' songs, particularly his covers of The Beatles' "With A Little Help From My Friends" (widely regarded as better than the song that inspired it) and Randy Newman's "You Can Leave Your Hat On" (which is the version you hear in 9½ Weeks). His rendition of "Up Where We Belong" (the theme to An Officer and a Gentleman) won him a Grammy, though sadly not an Oscar, since he didn't write it.
6	Christmas		782,413	This editor wishes his readers a happy post-Christmas, and hopes they didn't needlessly indulge as much as he did.
7	Chris Kyle		701,962	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. Last week, Ventura filed a new lawsuit directly against HarperCollins, who published Kyle's book, called, naturally, American Sniper.
8	The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies		540,660	The final instalment of The Hobbit film series debuted in New Zealand on December 11, and the United States on December 17. The film topped the US charts in its second weekend and, as of December 29, has already earned nearly $600 million worldwide.
9	Facebook		531,094	A perennially popular article.
10	Deaths in 2014		492,335	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.
11	Santa Claus		482,941	The patron saint of childhood greed makes his first and almost certainly last appearance of the year.
12	Stephen Hawking		465,030	The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon makes his eighth 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.
13	Kim Jong-un		458,750	North Korea's rotund princeling has risen to notice on the back of the controversy surrounding The Interview (see #1), 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.
14	Macaulay Culkin		439,328	The only reason I can find for this former child star and current pizza-parody song performer to be on the list this week is that Home Alone is a popular movie at Christmas. At least that's what all this week's news about him has to say.
15	Marco Polo		396,212	The release of the Marco Polo TV series on Netflix last week brought new attention to the 13th century Venetian explorer
16	The Hobbit (film series)		390,859	See #8.
17	American Sniper (film)		381,786	Clint Eastwood's latest directorial effort was released on Christmas Day (see #7)
18	Gone Girl (film)		370,936	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.
19	Guardians of the Galaxy (film)		360,240	This critically and popularly adored movie proved its staying power when its arrival on Blu-ray three weeks ago was greeted with a shot back into this list. It has yet to leave.
20	Santa Claus's reindeer		356,861	I initially thought this was a bogus surge, simply because it was such an obscure article to get wide attention, but it's apparently genuine.
21	Kwanzaa		351,963	This African American alternative to Christmas, a pan-African collage of various traditions, begins on December 26.
22	Louis Zamperini		350,352	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, out this week.
23	Winter solstice		345,264	The shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere has been a date of profound significance to humanity since before recorded history, as the image to the left indicates. It's interesting to note that "summer solstice" (which in the southern hemisphere is concurrent with the northern hemisphere's winter solstice) got just one 25th the numbers that "winter solstice" got, an indication, perhaps, of how northern-aligned the English-speaking world remains.
24	Unbroken (film)		339,850	Angelina Jolie's second directorial effort (a biopic of Louis Zamperini, see #22) premièred this weekend to a fairly staggering $46 million. This is particularly impressive when you consider that Jolie's first film as director, In the Land of Blood and Honey, made just $300,000 in its entire run.
25	Google		335,763	Always a fairly popular article.

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:

List of RTO districts in India: confirmed bot.

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