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Summary: We've recently come into possession of a new tool. The Wikimedia Foundation has finally got its analytics together and made its own version of the raw data list. This is all well and good; we always need new checks and balances to be sure we're excluding the right articles. But there's a problem; the two lists use different algorithms to arrive at their numbers, which means that, while the actual entrants on each list are the same, their counts can differ by more than 100,000 views. This doesn't tend to affect the top articles, which are usually too far apart for the differences to matter. But once you get down to the mid-and-bottom end, where the numbers are closer together, it's a sandstorm. This becomes particularly problematic when deciding which articles are actually in the Top 25 in the first place. So. Lacking any actual information regarding which algorithms are correct, I decided the best course of action was to split the difference. Literally. I added the numbers up, divided by two and whichever numbers resulted, that was the order I put them in. Which means that the current list is based on numbers in neither data set.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of May 8 to 14, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the combined average of the Top 5000 and TopViews, were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Captain America: Civil War | 
|
3,332,940 |  |
The 13th episode of Marvel Studios' reinvented movie serial is certain to reclaim the top spot at the US box office this weekend. Having earned $242 million in just eight days, its performance is about on par with Batman v Superman. But that film was the supposed launch of an entire franchise featuring the epic duel of two of the best known and iconic characters in all of comicdom. This is just another day at the Marvel office. For someone at Disney, life is very good indeed. |
| 2 | Eurovision Song Contest 2016 | 
|
936,232 |  |
For the first time in history, Americans were able to watch the annual sequinfest in all its interminable, trashy, gaudy glory, and no doubt come out of it wondering what all the fuss was about. Well here's what it's about: Europe's in a mess. We've got Russia making moves on Ukraine, Greece in seemingly permanent crisis, a flood of refugees bringing out the worst in us, and Britain thinking about leaving. In all that, we need something that brings us all together, no matter how corny. And here is the one chance the nations of Europe have to buoy each other up (unless they're the UK, in which case, a hug from Ireland is all we generally get). Nonetheless, this year's contest (Held at the Stockholm Globe Arena, pictured) ultimately boiled down to a battle between Russia and Ukraine, which, thanks to some passive-aggressive tactical voting in the former Soviet bloc, Ukraine won with the pointedly anti-Russian song "1944". |
| 3 | Deaths in 2016 | 
|
672,782 |  |
The annual list of deaths, always a fairly consistent visitor to this list, saw its average views jump after the death of David Bowie, and another jump after the death of Prince. |
| 4 | Donald Trump |
|
633,258 |  |
Numbers are down across the board this week, so Trump's relatively high position belies a drop in numbers of more than a third. With the GOP nomination in the bag, and only a small amount of off-the-cuff craziness to keep the public amused, viewers seem to be following the GOP and coming to quiet terms with the idea of his candidacy. |
| 5 | Game of Thrones (season 6) | 
|
586,085 |  |
The latest season of this eternally popular TV series premiered on HBO on 24 April. |
| 6 | Game of Thrones |
|
540,263 | |
See above. |
| 7 | Stephen Curry |
|
539,645 |  |
This week, the basketball player for the Golden State Warriors won the title of MVP for the second straight year, and became the first player to win the title unanimously. |
| 8 | X-Men: Apocalypse |
|
531,161 |  |
Hopes were high for this after the rapturous critical and commercial reception given to Bryan Singer's previous X-Men film, Days of Future Past; unfortunately the reviews for the followup have been largely negative, with the film struggling to reach a 60% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. How this will affect its box office performance when it opens over the next few weeks is uncertain, but Fox must be somewhat tense right now. |
| 9 | Mother's Day |
|
506,879 |  |
The second Sunday in May (that's May 8 to all you ingrates who forgot) is far and away the most popular time of year to celebrate Mother's Day. |
| 10 | Black Panther (comics) |
|
470,418 |  |
King T'Challa of Wakanda, chieftain of the Panther Clan and avatar of the Panther God, was the first ever true black superhero, created by Stan Lee in 1966. The name, amazingly, actually predates that of the Black Panther Party, which was founded the same year. Wikipedia users decided to delve into his extensive history after seeing him in live action for the first time in Captain America: Civil War, and ahead of his stand-alone movie in two years. |
| 11 | Mohammad Azharuddin |
|
458,914 | The once-beloved cricket captain turned politician was brought low in 2000 after a match-fixing scandal, dramatised this week by the Bollywood film Azhar. | |
| 12 | List of Marvel Cinematic Universe films | 
|
458,097 |  |
13, for lack of a better word, episodes in, Marvel's revival of the movie serial is getting complicated, and, as usual, users have made Wikipedia their episode guide of choice. |
| 13 | Deadpool (film) |
|
440,988 |  |
One thing Fox can take pride in is their supposedly risky decision to back an R-rated Deadpool film, which managed to make $762 million worldwide on a $58 million budget, and is back in the list thanks to its release on Blu-ray. |
| 14 | Prince (musician) |
|
408,854 |  |
Prince's recent death remains a subject of news coverage. |
| 15 | Marvel Cinematic Universe | 
|
391,216 | |
See #12 |
| 16 | A Moon Shaped Pool |
|
390,087 |  |
The first album from the band Radiohead in five years debuted at #1 in the UK and Australian charts, and is likely to make #3 once the US figures are tallied. Advance word for the film has been spread by the video for the album's single, Burn the Witch, which featured the stop-motion inhabitants of an Avalonian country idyll (made in the style of 70s/early 80s British children's TV) re-enacting the finale to The Wicker Man. |
| 17 | List of Bollywood films of 2016 |
|
389,759 |  |
Generally a popular yearly list article, often slightly below the Top 25. |
| 18 | Uncharted 4: A Thief's End |
|
382,659 |  |
As its title suggests, this is the fourth and final instalment in the Uncharted video game series (If you've never heard of it, think Indiana Jones with a higher body count). Upon its release this week, the game has received near-universal acclaim from critics and is expected to sell gangbusters once the numbers are in. |
| 19 | Sadiq Khan |
|
379,832 |  |
You know what the strangest thing about London's election of Sadiq Khan was? No one really cared that he was Muslim. I mean sure; Lynton Crosby's nasty opposition work tried to make us care, but we Londoners just didn't. If we thought about him at all, we thought he'd make less of a hash of the housing and transport crises. Only when the international news started picking up on it the next day did we realise that a Western capital electing a Muslim mayor in the era of Trump may actually have some symbolic significance, but once informed, most Londoners probably didn't care about that either. |
| 20 | Saúl Álvarez |
|
379,391 |  |
The current WBC, The Ring magazine and lineal middleweight champion retained his title this week by beating Amir Khan in a sixth-round knockout. He is now expected to fight Gennady Golovkin (see below). |
| 21 | Philippine presidential election, 2016 |
|
376,125 |  |
For anyone unnerved by the rise of Donald Trump, have cheer that he hasn't been connected to vigilante death squads, as the newly elected President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, known as the "Trump of the East" has. He once offered himself sexually to the brides of a mass wedding, apologising to the grooms that they wouldn't "get anything, because [he's] not a queer", said of an Australian missionary who had been gang-raped and murdered in prison that "she was so beautiful; [I] should have been first. What a waste", and has openly admitted to murdering suspected criminals. Unlike many on the island from which he hails, Mindanao, he is not a Muslim, which means he could conceivably meet President Trump at the White House. That would be a conversation to eavesdrop on. |
| 22 | Gennady Golovkin |
|
373,311 |  |
The Kazakhstani boxer and the current unified WBA (Super), IBF, IBO, and WBC middleweight champion is the next likely opponent for Saul Alvarez, after his defeat of Amir Khan. |
| 23 | Sairat |
|
373,098 |  |
Here's an interesting fact: If a film is made in Marathi, the language of the city of Mumbai (Bombay), it is not technically a Bollywood film, despite "Bollywood" being a contraction of "Bombay" and "Hollywood". "Bollywood" refers only to films made for the Hindi-speaking mass market; Marathi films have traditionally struggled to find a place beside them, and have largely withered on the vine in recent years. Until now. This old school inter-caste romance with a cast of near-unknowns has taken India by storm, breaking box office records for a Marathi film. |
| 24 | Rodrigo Duterte |
|
370,611 | |
See #21. |
| 25 | List of The Flash (2014 TV series) episodes |
|
368,905 |  |
Fans of the American television show The Flash were probably excited to learn that the latest ep would be helmed by cult director and comic fanatic Kevin Smith. |
