Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-05-17/Traffic report

Oh behave, Beyhive / Underdogs

Your Traffic Reports for the weeks of April 24-30 and May 1-7.

I would never pride myself on being unusual; however, I think it can be safely stated that I and my fellow native Wikipedians share few priorities with the general public. I have already mentioned in my previous post that I do not get spectator sports, and our viewers' unending obsession with the non-sport of professional wrestling remains to me an eternal source of mystification. But to those you could add any number of public obsessions completely outside my proverbial wheelhouse. Bikini bodies. Probiotic yoghurt. Singers and/or dancers below US drinking age. Pictures of genitalia posted on social media. Inexplicably popular Armenian-American families. But on the summit of that pile of mentally-erased files must perch the private lives of famous people. As an intensely private person myself, I do not believe that the lives of those who happen to attain a certain level of public regard are in the public domain, any more than their bodies are. So it always shocks me when a celebrity (like, say, Beyoncé) uses the travails of her private life as a means of viral marketing, as appears to have happened in the release of her latest album Lemonade. Her fans, known as the "Beyhive", have been sent into a predictable swarm, and are searching for blood. It is interesting to note that, while she supposedly used her album to castigate her husband Jay-Z for cheating on her, she still released it exclusively on his download service, Tidal.

For the full top-25 lists (and our archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see WP:MOSTEDITED.

For the week of April 24 to 30, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from WMF's TopViews, were:

The triumph of Captain America: Civil War at the box office and #1 on the chart this week is not surprising, but otherwise our top 10 has a number of improbable entries, all things considered. Donald Trump (#3) returns to the Top 10 (though he's remained solidly in the Top 25 in the past few weeks), having now essentially clinched the Republican nomination for U.S. President. Anyone who says they honestly predicted this when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower last June to announce his candidacy is simply lying. Even more improbable and happy news, however, comes from the world of English football, where Leicester City F.C. (#4) won the Premier League after starting the season with 5000 to 1 odds. Meanwhile, citizens of London may not see their new mayor Sadiq Khan (#9) as an underdog, but becoming the first Muslim mayor of a major Western capital is not something much of the world would have predicted.

For the full top-25 lists (and our archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see here.

For the week of May 1 to 7, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages (WP:5000), were: