Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/July 30 to August 5, 2017

WP:25

The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (July 30 to August 5, 2017)[edit]

Prepared with commentary by OZOO

← Last week's report – Next week's report →

Top article for the week of July 30 to August 5 was the death of American playwright Sam Shepard, hanging over from July 27. The continuing seventh season of Game of Thrones has the second place, and the fantasy drama also provides two more articles, for the series itself (#7) and the list of episodes (#21). The signing of Brazilian superstar footballer Neymar for a world-record fee by French side Paris Saint-Germain (#23) takes third.

There is the standard dose of pop-culture, with the continued popularity of Dunkirk keeping it at #5 and also adding the articles on the historical Battle of Dunkirk (#11) and the Dunkirk evacuation (#25) to the Top 25. The actress Laverne Cox reaches #4, largely on the back of a guest appearance on the judging panel at America's Got Talent. The Emoji Movie (#18), new Netflix series Ozark (#22) and the third season of animated sitcom Rick and Morty (#24) also make the list directly, while American domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski (#15) comes in following the commencement of the Discovery Channel series Manhunt: Unabomber.

A un-unusually tumultuous week at the White House provides two names to our list, the former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci (#6) and the newly-appointed White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly (#19). Sportswise, other than the aforementioned Neymar, UFC 214 (#9) took place, with the headline match being won by Jon Jones (#14). At the 2017 World Championships in Athletics, Usain Bolt (#12) had his hopes of a final race gold medal dashed by the controversial Justin Gatlin. (#17)

Some miscellany from elsewhere on the Internet, as well. The list of most viewed YouTube videos (#13) is here with the news that the video-sharing website has a new champion. Reddit and Google Doodles provide a new entry each; the Rosenhan experiment (#20) and the late actress Dolores del Río (#16) respectively. Finally, the much discussed "Blue Whale" game (#10) gets into the list after it was linked to the suicide of a teenage in Mumbai.

For the week of July 30 to August 5, 2017, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Sam Shepard	1,882,338	Sam Shepard, the American award-winning playwright and actor, died on July 27 at the age 73. Shepard won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Chuck Yeager in 1983's The Right Stuff, and won ten Obie Awards, the most of any writer or director.
2	Game of Thrones (season 7)	1,065,285	The seventh series of the massively popular fantasy series Game of Thrones continues. In the episode the week of this report, entitled "The Queen's Justice", Grey Worm and the Unsullied attacked Casterly Rock. Had I watched any episode up to this point, I would be able to tell you the significance of that event, long term.
3	Neymar	1,016,518	Football news now, as Brazilian star Neymar Jr. – reckoned to be the fourth-best player in the world after Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo & Fabian Delph – moved from F.C. Barcelona to Paris St. Germain (#23). The sum of money required to get him from Barcelona to Paris was €222 million – more than double the fee Manchester United sent on Paul Pogba last year in the previous most expensive transfer.
4	Laverne Cox	924,565	Laverne Cox, the Emmy-nominated actress known for her roles in Orange Is the New Black and Doubt, gets into the list this week on the back of an appearance on the August 1 episode of America's Got Talent, as a guest judge on the "Judges Cuts" round.
5	Dunkirk (2017 film)	924,387	Christopher Nolan's (pictured) acclaimed war film based on the Dunkirk evacuation (#25) is still gripping audiences, with its ensemble cast including Fionn Whitehead, Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance and One Direction's Harry Styles, as well as near-universally positive reviews, having the movie's current worldwide box-office at $319 million and rising.
6	Anthony Scaramucci	817,811	Anthony Scaramucci was appointed as White House Communications Director on July 21 and fired on July 31, which is barely enough time to get into a miniseries based on the Trump administration, never mind the inevitable film. In his tumultuous ten days in office, Scaramucci missed the birth of his child, accused an individual of leaking a publicly-available form and gave an expletive-filled interview to The New Yorker, in which he accused White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon of a desire to perform an anatomically difficult act. Hmm, maybe he can be in the film.
7	Game of Thrones	752,193	No surprise to see the fantasy drama series, based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R. R. Martin (pictured), in the list. It usually is when the series is being broadcast, after all. And often when it isn't.
8	Deaths in 2017	720,243	Whose skull was that, anyway?
9	UFC 214	688,208	July 29 saw the 214th event organised by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, held at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California. A crowd of 16,610 fight fans – plus many more watching at home – saw a night of action culminating in Jon Jones (#14) reclaiming the UFC Light Heavyweight Championship title he was stripped of in 2015 from current holder Daniel Cormier (pictured). Jones won via knockout in the third round after a head kick and a barrage of strikes on the ground. If you are thinking of becoming a MMA fighter and want to avoid being similarly knocked out by a head kick, my advice would be to consider taking up table tennis instead.
10	Blue Whale (game)	680,052	The Blue Whale game is a supposed Internet "game" in which "participants" are sent a list of tasks to complete daily, some of which involve self-mutilation, and the final task is suicide. The "game" originated in Russia, and was linked to a spate of suicides at the start of the year, with one of the "game"'s administrators having pled guilty to inciting suicide in May. This has not stopped the "game" from spreading, and the presence of it in this list is likely due to a suicide in Mumbai this week allegedly being part of the game. Some have questioned whether the deceased teenager was actually involved in the "game". Snopes has a section on various claims made about the game and its impact, which it classifies as "unproven"
11	Battle of Dunkirk	622,996	The 1940 Battle of Dunkirk, which forms the backdrop for Christopher Nolan's film (#5), keeps people's interest as the film does.
12	Usain Bolt	534,227	The world 100m and 200m record holder and ~~nine~~ eight-time Olympic gold medallist ran the final 100 meter race of his career at the 2017 World Championships in Athletics at the London Stadium, which is in London. By 0.03 of a second, he was denied the perfect fairytale ending, finishing in third with American Justin Gatlin (#17) picking up gold. More on him later.
13	List of most viewed YouTube videos	533,738	The title of most-viewed video on YouTube was held by Psy and his song "Gangnam Style" for four and a half years, before it was taken at the start of July by "See You Again" from Wiz Khalifa. It must be a bit of a blow for Mr. Khalifa that he has already lost the title, to the song "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi (pictured) and Daddy Yankee. Mr. Fonsi and Mr. Yankee's achievement is all the more remarkable considering the video was only uploaded at the start of the year.
14	Jon Jones	513,444	Jon Jones, the mixed martial artist, reclaimed his UFC Light Heavyweight Championship title from Daniel Cormier at UFC 214 (#9). Jones originally lost his title in April 2015 after he was arrested in connection with a hit-and-run incident which injured a pregnant woman, while a previous attempt to have him fight Cormier for the title at UFC 200 was ended when Jones tested positive for doping, receiving a ban he has only just returned from.
15	Ted Kaczynski	508,161	Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, is an American domestic terrorist currently serving 8 consecutive life sentences at ADX Florence. A drama series starring Paul Bettany as Kaczynski has begun broadcast on the Discovery Channel this week. The series, Manhunt: Unabomber, depicts the FBI's hunt for Kaczynski, and in the interests of avoiding spoilers I won't tell you whether or not they ever caught him.
16	Dolores del Río	467,199	Mexican actress Dolores del Río was born on August 3, 1904. She is regarded as the first major female Latin American crossover star in Hollywood, and her career spanned silent film, sound film, television, stage and radio. She died on April 11, 1983. The 113th anniversary of her birth was marked with a Google Doodle on August 3, 2017.
17	Justin Gatlin	465,795	Justin Gatlin, the American sprinter twice banned for doping offences, was heavily booed by the London Stadium crowd prior to the world championship 100 meter final. The crowd weren't happy with him after the event either, when he had taken gold from the man they had mostly been backing, Usain Bolt (#12), in his final race. The victory and reaction raised questions about whether someone with Gatlin's history should even be allowed to compete. Incidentally, the silver medallist, Christian Coleman, is on 48,866 and doesn't even make the top 1,250 report.
18	The Emoji Movie	460,376	:(
19	John F. Kelly	445,313	John F. Kelly took office as White House Chief of Staff on July 31, replacing Reince Priebus and transferring from the position of US Secretary of Homeland Security which he had held since the inauguration of Donald Trump. One of the first actions taken by the former United States Marine Corps general was to order the removal of Anthony Scaramucci (#6) from his role as White House Communications Director.
20	Rosenhan experiment	441,577	David Rosenhan, a psychologist and professor at Stanford University, conducted a study published in 1973 in which he and a number of associates feigned hallucinations to get admission to a number of psychiatric hospitals, amongst them St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. (pictured); once inside, they would stop feigning. All were forced to admit to mental illness and had to agree to take anti-psychotic drugs in order to get released from the hospitals. This very interesting thing also interested Reddit, with the TodayILearned post seeing 84k+ upvotes and almost 4.5k comments.
21	List of Game of Thrones episodes	428,988	There have been six and a half seasons of the fantasy drama so far, which sounds a lot to anyone not yet into it. But the seasons are short so it currently only makes 64 episodes, which seems much more manageable. Perhaps I will get into it, just as soon as I've polished off the boxset of Great British Railway Journeys.
22	Ozark (TV series)	417,143	Jason Bateman stars in, and for some episodes directs, this new Netflix series, released on July 21. In the series, Bateman's character Marty Byrde relocates his family from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks after a money laundering scheme goes wrong. The series has received generally positive reviews, and has been compared to Breaking Bad.
23	Paris Saint-Germain F.C.	399,112	Last season was a bit of a disappointment for Les Rouge-et-Bleu. A four-goal lead to F.C. Barcelona was surrendered in the UEFA Champions League round of sixteen; while in the French league, they went from winning the 2015–16 season by 31 points (their fourth consecutive triumph), to finishing 8 points behind AS Monaco FC. The club's Qatari owners have identified the standard solution to all footballing problems – chuck money at it, smashing the world transfer record to sign Neymar (#3) from Barcelona. With Monaco's young squad having largely been broken up by other clubs, PSG will be expecting to take the Ligue 1 trophy back to Parc des Princes (pictured), but it will be European success that shall be the real benchmark for them.
24	Rick and Morty (season 3)	389,647	The third series of the animated sitcom about mad scientist Rick Sanchez and his grandson Morty Smith, both voiced by series co-creator Justin Roiland (pictured), began its full broadcast on July 30 on Adult Swim, after the first episode was broadcast unannounced multiple times back on April Fool's Day.
25	Dunkirk evacuation	383,447	The successful evacuation of 338,226 Allied troops from Dunkirk following the Battle of Dunkirk (#11), is the primary basis of the movie Dunkirk. (#5) Amusingly, this kept off the list the movie that dethroned Dunkirk from the box office, The Dark Tower (375,232 views).

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. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the talk page if you wish.
Per consensus, XXX is excluded.

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