Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-06-04/Traffic report
Autumn in summer
The northern summer is a time when one is meant to celebrate the exuberance of life; instead, commemoration of the dead was a significant theme this week, as the top three slots were taken up by the beloved poet Maya Angelou, dead this week at 86, environmentalist pioneer Rachel Carson, and Memorial Day, the US holiday for commemorating its war dead. Even Mark Twain's eerie prediction of his own death, in which he hoped to go out with Halley's Comet, got onto the list thanks to Reddit. Other than that, the usual dose of Game of Thrones; a show very familiar with death.
For the full top 25 list, see
For the week of 25 to 31 May, the 10 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 Maya Angelou 
1,227,753 One of America's most popular contemporary writers, Maya Angelou died this week at the age of 86. Since delivering a recitation at Bill Clinton's inauguration (the first poet to give an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost) she became an intellectual celebrity across all boundaries. 2 Rachel Carson
876,502 
The marine biologist and conservationist whose 1962 book Silent Spring became a founding text of the environmental movement and led to the abolition of DDT as a pesticide got a Google Doodleon her would-have-been 107th birthday on 27 May.3 Memorial Day 
765,063 
The last Monday in May (that's May 26 this year), the day that the United States chose to honour its war dead, is perhaps better known as the traditional beginning of US summer vacation, and is thus eagerly anticipated by millions of people too young to serve but old enough to stand in line for action movies. 4 Game of Thrones (season 4)
712,695 
This is the page with the plot synopses for each episode. 5 Halley's Comet
706,568 
I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together." So said Mark Twain in his autobiography in 1909, and it turned out he was right. He died the day after the comet's 1910 perihelion. This curious fact managed to spawn a Reddit thread this week (the original poster wondered, I hope jokingly, if the fact that he was born when Halley returned in 1986 meant he was a reincarnation of Mark Twain – respondents were lukewarm to the notion). 6 Amazon.com
701,370 
This article suddenly reappeared in the top 25 a few months ago after a long absence; it's always difficult to determine the reasons for the popularity of website articles (how many are simply missed clicks on the Google search list?) but there are a number of possibilities: first, it released its Hachette, a spat with potentially world-shaking implications as to whether book publishers even need to exist in the post-digital world.7 List of Game of Thrones episodes 
642,862 The episode list is probably used to look up air dates. 8 Game of Thrones
587,030 New seasons of this immensely popular show always draw people to Wikipedia. 9 X-Men (film series) 
559,739 
X-Men: Days of Future Past, Bryan Singer's cross-generational collaboration uniting his original cast of fogies with their younger selves introduced in X-Men: First Class, earned $90 million in its first weekend, but seems not to be generating the fire of other Marvel Comics franchises. Still, it appears to have triggered interest online. 10 Watch Dogs
519,597 The third-person adventure game in which video game consoles. Well, it worked; the game has sold 4 million copies in its first week.
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