Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-08-18/Traffic report

Olympic views

Your traffic reports for the weeks July 31 – August 6, and August 7–13, 2016

For the full top-25 lists (and our archives back to January 2013), see

Since the Olympic Opening Ceremony was on August 5 and this chart runs through August 6, the

In other, more technical news, the data in this week's report comes solely from TopViews. The data feed used to generate the

For the week July 31 – August 6, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from Topviews Analysis were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Suicide Squad (film)		2,889,015		DC Cinematic Universe, which was released on August 5 to generally negative reviews. Nonetheless, it grossed $267 million worldwide in its opening weekend. Star Margot Robbie also landed the #7 spot this week, and two characters in the film, Robbie's Harley Quinn and Enchanttress , also make the Top 25.
2	2016 Summer Olympics		1,421,144		Up from #15 last week as the games finally got underway. Opening rounds in some events began on August 3, and the opening ceremony (#22) was held on August 5. This Olympics will have over 11,000 athletes from 206 National Olympic Committees (which includes all 193 members of the United Nations and additional special entities), competing in 28 sports. Two new sports this time include rugby sevens and golf. Golf is actually a returning sport, last featured at the 1904 games. Sadly, my favorite sport from the 1904, the plunge for distance, will not be returning. Michael Phelps (#9) is not quite that old, but he's back too.
3	Harry Potter and the Cursed Child		1,381,205		It seems like ever since J.K. Rowling published the last Harry Potter book in 2007 and vowed that the series was over, magical forces have eaten away at that pledge. And the biggest step away from that promise, if not a complete retreat, is the mounting of a London play which sets Harry twenty years in the future. The play script was released in book form on July 31, and bookstores tried to recreate the fervor of the prior book releases. And no doubt it will sell a ton of copies, but based on reviews, it does tarnish the legend a bit.
4	Stranger Things (TV series)		1,200,720		90,000 views more than last week. This E.T. in 1996, 2006, or 2016, and the kid is still going to laugh and cry at the same parts. So Stranger Things taps into a nostalgia that is not limited to 1983, but one that is part of a common experience of youth, at least in America. Also, since I'm already pontificating, let me note that setting the series in 1983 is very helpful in dealing with the troublesome issue of cellphones. It has been noted that mobile phones "must be one of the worst things ever to happen to horror movies", but in 1983, when a kid left the house, no one knew where the hell they were. No one can pull up Google Maps or post Instagram photos of monsters. Today, if the Yeti isn't on twitter, he does not exist.
5	Donald Trump		806,195		Donald Trump likely said something controversial during the week, just guessing.
6	Harry Potter		785,355		See #3. Interestingly, a Harry Potter product has never appeared on the Top 25 until this week. The last film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, was released in July 2011, 18 months before the report began. Reviewing stats.grok.se data, for the week of July 17–23, 2011, that film had 891,856 views (non-mobile only), which was likely enough to be #1 for the week at that time, or close to it.
7	Margot Robbie		636,032		Starring in #1.
8	List of Steven Universe episodes		610,304		Up from #19 and 480K views last week. It's not often that kids' cartoons get on this list; My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic hasn't managed it in 5 years. But then, Steven Universe isn't exactly a kids' cartoon. In fact I'm not entirely sure I can explain what it is, but if you can imagine a magical girl anime remade in English with a gender-swapped lead, you can get some idea. The show has in the past been notorious for its patchy release schedule, and, as if in contrition, Cartoon Network are releasing new episodes of the show every day during the so-called "Summer of Steven". This has necessitated much checking of release times, hence the list's appearance here.
9	Michael Phelps		608,707		The most decorated Olympian of all time has returned for the 2016 Summer Olympics (#2). If you are in America, there is no way the television coverage misses a moment of anything Michael Phelps does. In fact, I understand that there are sports where America does not predominate in the Olympics, but that rarely makes it to American television. I went and looked at the medal table, and see, for example, that Kazakhstan has won 7 medals so far. This includes three in judo and three in weightlifting, which might have been covered somewhere on American television on an obscure cable network, but certainly nothing they've promoted. I bet weightlifting and judo are all over television in Kazakhstan.
10	Deaths in 2016		604,639		The views for the annual list of deaths are remarkably consistent on a day-to-day basis. It was consistently higher in the first half of 2016 with a string of highly notable deaths, but things seem to be calming down a bit.

This week marked Wikipedia's hosting of the 2016 Summer Olympics; the first since this list was begun. With only Super Bowls and Oscar nights to compare it to, we didn't have much in the way of precedent. And, while not exactly staggering, the numbers are fairly eye-opening. Fully 17 slots in the top 25 were devoted to the Olympics, probably a list record for a single event, and the entry point was the highest since last December, which featured the return of another beloved cultural institution, Star Wars. The groundswell was so big it not only knocked Donald Trump off the list for the first time in months, but almost knocked the death list off, a virtually unprecedented occurrence. Personally, I know nothing about sports, and have no ties to any sports stars, so I have to say I'm a bit bemused by the tribalism this list reveals. en.wikipedia likes to think of itself as the English language Wikipedia, not the American Wikipedia, but there's no denying which country was the main focus of people's attention. Don't get me wrong; I don't blame Americans for this- I live in London and you can bet the popular press there are fawning over British winners exclusively. But I have to ask, whatever happened to "Well played!"?

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week August 7–13, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from Topviews Analysis were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Michael Phelps		5,428,201		Numbers have increased ninefold for the most decorated Olympian of all time, who came out of retirement for the 2016 Summer Olympics and swept the pool, as it were, with five gold medals and one silver, before finally calling it quits for good. In a world currently short of sporting heroes, Phelps has proven an inspiration; after each of his prior Olympic meets, pool attendance in the United States increased by more than 10%, and the press have made much of a photo of him standing next to an awestruck then-9-year-old Katie Ledecky (#6), who dominated the women's pool.
2	2016 Summer Olympics		2,281,692		As I said, I know next to nothing about sports, but I do know about Rio, the city where I lived for a time and for whom I have the kind of guarded love one reserves for that wayward family member who has never lived up to your expectations. When it won the right to host the games seven years ago, I was ecstatic. Finally, it seemed Brazil was ready to ditch its old habits and assert itself as a global power. How different things are now, or rather, how like they were. The news that everything had gone, well, Rio-y in the lead up to the games left me feeling deflated. The almost comical string of disasters that had thrown the world for such a loop were old hat to anyone who had sat through the city's numerous other attempts to host major world events. And yet ... I'm relieved. Relieved, because so far the only major scandal has been a discoloured diving pool. If that's all the press is concerned with, maybe this won't be a disaster after all.
3	Suicide Squad (film)		2,150,660		DC Cinematic Universe, which was released on August 5 to generally negative reviews. Nonetheless, it grossed $267 worldwide in its opening weekend. Despite the overwhelming presence of the Olympics this week, star Margot Robbie also landed the #18 spot, just above her character, Harley Quinn .
4	Simone Biles		1,832,829		The 19-year-old Olympic first-timer secured two gold medals in artistic gymnastics this week.
5	Aly Raisman		1,400,901		It's hard to know what has placed the two-time captain of the US artistic gymnastics team farther up this list, her gold and silver medal wins, or the viral video of her mother's increasingly frantic head motions. It says something about the stresses of Olympic life that her performance is considered a comeback after "only" winning a gold and a bronze in London.
6	Katie Ledecky		1,022,491		The only person Katie Ledecky ever races against is herself. No one races her. The 19-year-old swimmer secured four golds this week, breaking two world records in the process, both her own, in the 400 m and 800 m freestyle. In the 800m, she not only broke her own world record by nearly 2 seconds, but finished nearly 12 seconds ahead of the silver medallist, Britain's Jazz Carlin . 12 seconds. That's enough time to update her Wikipedia article on your cellphone.
7	Nicole Johnson (Miss California USA)		912,940		Surprisingly, her appearance on this list has nothing to do with Donald Trump, who owned the Miss USA pageant until last September, but simply that she happens to be the wife of Michael Phelps (see #1).
8	Stranger Things (TV series)		855,038		This E.T., The Goonies and Explorers, though aimed mostly at adults. It has been a smash hit for Netflix, out-rating even its other big fantasy shows like Daredevil and Jessica Jones , both of which have topped this list in the past.
9	No Man's Sky		819,437		Let's be honest here; this game was never going to live up to the hype. Made by a small indie developer under intense time and budget constraints, No Man's Sky has had players slavering for over four years with its promise of 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets crammed with procedurally generated alien life that you could travel to and from seamlessly in your procedurally generated starship. The question of what you would be expected to do with all that freedom to explore has always been at the front of players' minds, and something the developers have been remarkably coy about. Now that the game has finally been released, it turns out it's basically a cross between Elite Dangerous and Minecraft. To some, that's fine; to most, it's a disappointment.
10	Olympic Games		892,180		People are probably looking for this Olympic Games, rather than seeking knowledge of the event's venerable history, though I'd be happy to be proven wrong.