Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-16/Traffic report

A feast of Spam

By now, I hope most of our viewers understand that this list is not a perfect reflection of raw data. Wikipedia is subject to spamming, botnets and even legitimate calibration checks that riddle the list with non-human views. Ever since this list began, we've had to use our own judgement and what evidence we had to determine which cases are real and which are not, and in the past, such decisions could be agonizing. Since the inclusion of mobile views, however, what used to be a torturous experience has become fairly routine. No more checking viewing patterns; no more furious data mining of Google hits; no more frantic attempts to wrangle Reddit's lousy search engine. Just check the mobile percentage, and if it's too low or too high, drop it. But this week, it seems the Internet has decided it wants to screw with us in a number of ways. Not only was this one of the most spammed lists ever, with 17 removals, but our #1, Donald Trump, was tenth on the raw list. Even more frustratingly, several articles, while suspicious, were just within our criteria for inclusion, leading to a return to the familiar spasms of self-doubt.

For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of December 6 to 12, 2015, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were: