Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-12-24/Traffic report


 * This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga (November 18 to 24, December 2 to 8 and December 9 to 15) and OZOO (November 25 to December 1).

I wish I was in Tijuana, eating barbecued iguana (November 18 to 24)
Narcos is back, only this time in Mexico (#13), and this means Netflix users are sorely tempted to pause their binge-watching and learn more about the drug lords (#1, #10, #23) and their victims (#12). The streaming service even got the latest Coen brothers film (#15), although on Wikipedia it did not garner as many viewers as films in theaters, about Queen (#2, #16, #25), A Kind of Magic (#5, #18), and someone who will Spread Your Wings and Gonna Fly Now (#21). Regular TV also leads to extra entries regarding a British reality show (#9, #19, #22) and the latest WWE event (#11). And in spite of being Thanksgiving (#6, #17) — followed by the usual shopping sprees (#8) — some people instead had a week where they were hardly thankful for: a rapper got arrested (#3), a missionary joined the never-leaving death list (#14) for trying to convert an hostile and isolated tribe (#4, #7), some European footballers fell short in their latest tournament (#20), and Trump got into the usual problems (#24).

Hail to the Chief (November 25 to December 1)
The top story of the week of November 25 to December was the death of former President of the United States George H. W. Bush. Second place was the release of new Indian film 2.0, and third was the death of SpongeBob SquarePants creator, Stephen Hillenburg. Further down the list, a number of the subjects of Netflix's Narcos: Mexico were in the list, as were the lead pugilists of Deontay Wilder vs. Tyson Fury and a motley crew of musicians, TV personalities, and Baroque painters.

Reading Around the Bush (December 2 to 8)
George H. W. Bush died on a Saturday, so the following week still had lots of people searching for what the former U.S. President did, and led him to repeat as the top article while inspiring half the articles on this Top 25 (13, because counting the never-leaving death list as the 14th is a stretch), including George's dead wife, all his offspring (including another White House occupant and a daughter who died in her infancy), a daughter in-law, and the guy who he was VP for. Otherwise, we have India giving lots of money (#25) to 2.0 (#3) and seeing celebrities also spending a similar fortune to get married (#4, #5), the UK searching for a celebrity in the jungle (#18) with a famous mom (#20), three guys who returned from last week (#10, #11, #19), and another who'll probably take a while to leave (#22).

For the week of December 2 to 8, 2018, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

India controls report (December 9 to 15)
The second most populous country on Earth has more than 10% of its 1 billion people speaking English, so no wonder sometimes the Top 25 Report gets extremely Indian. Local blockbusters (#3, #14), marriages of local rich people (#10), local important people (#7)... and if you wanna get technical, there's a Parsi-descendant rock legend at #8. Still, the list is topped by YouTube's "hall of dishonor", now led by the video service's own YouTube Spotlight channel as millions of people showed their disdain for the latest YouTube Rewind. Some superheroes are also present: DC Comics has an Aquaman movie (#5, portrayed by #2, married to #4), while Marvel gives an animated Spider-Man (#9). That obituary that just won't leave (#6) completes the top 10.

Exclusions

 * These lists exclude 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 Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.
 * Exo (band) and BTS (band): the Billboard Social 50 might accept the EXO-Ls and the BTS Army checking the pages of these K-pop groups many times daily for their rankings, but we won't condone this gaming of the system.