Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-20/Traffic report

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

This week's list is dominated by the death of Robin Williams (#1), the famous and unique American comedian and actor. Over 9 million views in a week, an extremely high number. This week no fewer than five of the top 10 articles, and nine of the top 25, are related to Williams. On August 12, when his death was announced, the article had just over 6.5 million views in one day. As far as the Report is aware, the only death to ever exceed that one-day total to date has been Steve Jobs on October 6, 2011, with 7.3 million views. And though you can't rely only on Wikipedia view counts as a measure of popularity, Williams' one-day total also exceeds those of Whitney Houston (February 12, 2012; with 5.97 million) and Michael Jackson (June 26, 2009; 5.88 million).

Perhaps more importantly, Wikipedia view counts surely have far less correlation with a subject's happiness. Did Williams know how universally he was loved? Does it matter? Williams was reportedly suffering from severe depression before his death from

For the full top 25 list, see

For the week of August 10–16, 2014, 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	Robin Williams		9,164,280		The unexpected death by suicide of this iconic comic on August 11 led to worldwide tributes. This article was viewed more than 9 million times this week, which is a phenomenal number—the most viewed article of the week is more normally in the range of 1–2 million views.
2	Robin Williams filmography		1,282,620		Williams' death also led to many remembrances of his popular performances, including his performance as a therapist in Popeye .
3	Asphyxia		1,263,006		Unfortunately this article comes in at #3, as the cause of death of Robin Williams. The vast majority of these views came on August 12, when news of his death spread. A few attempts by inexperienced editors to add specific mention of Williams in the article were quickly reverted. These readers would be well served to note the extensive categories we have regarding cause of death. Williams has already been added to Category:Comedians who committed suicide, and will likely soon be added to Category:Suicides by asphyxiation.
4	Lauren Bacall		1,205,937		This popular and sultry American actress, best known for her movie performances in the 1940s and 1950s, and as the leading lady to Humphrey Bogart (whom she married in 1945), died on August 12. As her New York Times obituary remarked, her "lasting mystique put her on a plateau in American culture that few stars reach."
5	Zelda Williams		968,075		The daughter of Robin Williams and Marsha Garces, Zelda was made the subject of abuse by trolls on Twitter sending her photoshopped images of her father's body among other evil missives, and then decided to take a break from (anti)social media. Before she left, she shared a post on tumblr that noted: "While I'll never, ever understand how he could be loved so deeply and not find it in his heart to stay, there's minor comfort in knowing our grief and loss, in some small way, is shared with millions."
6	Ebola virus disease		883,656		Down from #1 last week, this remains a highly sought-after topic. See also 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak
7	Yazidi		638,533		This fascinating ethno-religious group, neither Islamic State .
8	Power Girl		634,358		Power Girl is a DC Comics heroine. She has all the Tanya Spears .
9	Guardians of the Galaxy (film)		581,679		Dropping from #2 to #9 this week, this 2014 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics series opened in the UK on July 31 and the US on August 1.
10	Marsha Garces		534,522		The former wife of Robin Williams, and the mother of Zelda (#5). On August 16, the article was moved to Marsha Garces Williams, which was a redirect at the time and garnered almost 90,000 views itself on August 12. If we added those to the view count totals, #9 and #10 would switch places.

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Hit count for Jackson - as I remember it Wikipedia had problems that day? So the hit count would have been much higher! Christian75 (talk) 20:41, 23 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Interesting, I hadn't heard of that possibility before. There must have been a stats issue prior to his death, as much of his June 2009 stats records is blank [1], but stats are recorded from the end of the month when he died. At User:Milowent/sandbox I have a little chart I started on most popular death viewcounts, I am sure I'm missing some high profile cases, if anyone wants to take a gander at it. The article traffic stats tool linked on the history tab only goes back to December 2007, I presume there are older sources of data too though I haven't looked for them.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 03:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• I'm glad this list wasn't being done ten years ago. According to a Help Desk archive from back then which I was just looking at, the most viewed articles included List of sex positions, Penis, and Pornography.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:02, 25 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • I can actually imagine that happening even today, though thankfully few people use Wikipedia as a porn site. --k6ka (talk | contribs) 12:13, 26 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• I'd love to see that old compilation. Articles like
  WP:5000, which represents about the top 0.1% of the most popular articles on the project. Because these articles are steadily popular, they will always appear higher on annual compilations, e.g., for all of 2013 [2], Sex was #24.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 13:17, 26 August 2014 (UTC)[reply
  ]