Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-03-12/Traffic report

War and awards

An intensely busy week, as a confluence of celebratory, curious and urgent topics pushed typical residents like

For the week of 2 to 6 March, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Crimea		1,381,295		The evil of a strategic position is to be the plaything of great powers, and, 160 years after inspiring Siege of Sevastopol,* the balaclava, and Florence Nightingale , the hapless peninsula has become so again. *The first one, anyway
2	Jared Leto		1,284,466		To the surprise of absolutely no one, this handsome onetime Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Dallas Buyers Club. To quite a few people's surprise, however, he then used his acceptance speech to show solidarity with the people of Ukraine and the LGBT community, which of course had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Russia's sudden decision not to broadcast the Oscars. No siree.
3	Lupita Nyong'o		1,218,156		This virtually unknown Kenyan/Mexican actress won the 12 Years A Slave , and set the media abuzz with her red-carpet style.
4	Ukraine		1,038,754		Things are moving fast in the country, from asserted his manhood to his near neighbours , the conflict lasted a week. Here's hoping a similar outcome prevails now.
5	12 Years a Slave (film)		898,627		Although it only won 3 Oscars on the night, one of them was Best Picture, ensuring that Solomon Northup 's account of his captivity in the antebellum American South would generate massive interest from the public.
6	86th Academy Awards		840,314		Many of the wins may have seemed predestined, but the down-to-the-wire marathon for Best Picture between box office hits The Return of the King walked away with the shop, proving once again that audiences want to see the films they watched win.
7	Matthew McConaughey		827,293		Again to no one's surprise, the Hollywood hunk once thought slightly adrift won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Dallas Buyers Club
8	Dallas Buyers Club		764,350		This film drew attention to a much-neglected part of history (the botched response of the American authorities to the early spread of the AIDS epidemic) but was noted in the end mainly for the committed performances it inspired.
9	True Detective (TV series)		703,977		This HBO police procedural stars Woody Harrelson and actor-of-the-moment Matthew McConaughey
10	Ash Wednesday		694,377		There was a time, not so long ago really, when this moveable feast marking the first day of Lent would have been the main topic of discussion among the public. Times have changed. Most people don't even fast for Lent any more, let alone show their devotion by marking their foreheads with ash. That said, people are still curious about what it all means.

← Previous "Traffic report"

Next "Traffic report" →

In this issue

12 March 2014

News and notes

Traffic report

Featured content

WikiProject report

+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

• Interesting to see Ash Wednesday snubbed as, essentially, not being popular. Obviously there is a great deal of discussion or it wouldn't be one of the highly viewed pages for the week. Killiondude (talk) 22:49, 18 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The point was that, in the recent past, this would have been the top topic; of course, people are still curious about it (modified commentary to clarify that). Serendi^podous 23:05, 18 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure there has been a time in the last 50 years when Ash Wednesday would be a more popular topic than the Oscars or a developing international crisis. Powers ^T 14:46, 21 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking, late 19th century. I speak Anglo-Saxon and Ancient Greek, so perhaps I have a slightly elastic definition of "recent". Serendi^podous 15:15, 21 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]