Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-10-31/Traffic report

All around the world, you've got to spread the word (September 22 to 28)

This is a week where our report goes all over the place, and this can be attested by how the only article with millions of views is a teenage environmental activist. Otherwise, there's crimes (#2), deaths (#3, #6, #7), economical turmoil (#4) , movies (#5, #8), TV (#10), and Google Doodles (#9).

For the week of September 22 to 28, 2019, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

What a Joker, I play my jokes upon you (September 29 to October 5)

Jokers, meth cookers, and child stars (October 6 to 12)

There are some interesting connections in this week's report. #1 is a popular new film, in which #2 plays #8, who was previously played by #7. #22 is the partner of #2, while #12 is his younger brother, and was a child star who died of a drug overdose, much like #13. That neat mesh of connections covers a good chunk of the week's report, while the remainder comprise a familiar mix of wrestling, Indian movies, Netflix productions, and of course dead celebrities.

For the week of October 6 to 12, 2019, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	About
1	Joker (2019 film)		3,916,575		It's no surprise that this week's list is going to be dominated by Jokers. The latest, and perhaps most controversial, incarnation of the comic book character (item #1) hit cinemas earlier this month. It features #2 as an isolated, lonely and mentally ill would-be comic who slowly finds his villainous side.
2	Joaquin Phoenix		1,766,842
3	War (2019 film)		1,109,505		We always see a lot of movies on this list, but it's not every week that a non-English film makes it quite so high up. This Hindi-language action thriller stars Tiger Shroff as an Indian soldier assigned to hunt down his former mentor, played by Hrithik Roshan.
4	El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie		834,546		It wouldn't be a Top 25 without a Netflix original movie or series. This week's #4 completes the story of Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul and last seen in the finale of Breaking Bad back in 2013.
5	Hell in a Cell (2019)		792,414		The Top 25 isn't all Netflix, wrestling and death, I promise. But of course the latest big wrestling event always has to make an appearance, and this week it was this one that took place on October 6, 2019 at Sacramento, California .
6	Deaths in 2019		736,002		Death and taxes may be taxes never seems to appear on the Top 25 for some reason, so I guess we're all a lot more interested in death.
7	Heath Ledger		610,510		Interest in the latest actor to play the Joker seems to have sparked interest in the character himself, as well as the previous incumbent of the role. At the time, many felt that Heath Ledger's portrayal in The Dark Knight in 2008 could never be matched. Whether that's still true is, and will probably remain, a matter of considerable debate.
8	Joker (comics)		589,608
9	Ginger Baker		540,799		The first of this week's recently-deceased celebrities, Peter 'Ginger' Baker was an English drummer and the co-founder of rock band Cream. He died on 6 October 2019 after a short illness.
10	Samuel Little		537,066		Believed to be America's most prolific serial killer, Little claims to have killed 93 people and appears on this list after making headlines for closing a number of cold cases through the chilling portraits he draws of his victims.

While It Chapter Two didn't have the lasting power of the first on our report, the same can't be said of another monster clown, albeit one more human: Batman's nemesis Joker, whose solo movie has topped the list for three weeks and brought along the main actor (#4). More movies can also be found, on Netflix (#8) and Indian theaters (#9) – the country also produced a Nobel winner (#6). Present as always are the recently deceased (#2, #5, #7, #16), politics (#10), and Google Doodles (#3).

For the week of October 13 to 19, 2019, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	About
1	Joker (2019 film)		2,163,336		Jared Leto apparently tried to block this movie from being made, given Warner Bros. had promised a solo Joker film for him, only to greenlight this unrelated 1970s throwback instead. And now Joker is almost outgrossing Leto's maligned take in Suicide Squad, with much more positive reviews, to boot.
2	Sulli		1,388,588		Ever since "Gangnam Style", K-pop has broken out in surprising ways, specially for those who write and read this report. And this entry related to South Korean music is a sad one, as singer/actress Choi "Sulli" Jin-ri died from a possible suicide at just 25, following cyberbullying taking its toll.
3	Joseph Plateau		1,076,405		Google celebrated this Belgian physicist whose research on optics led to the phenakistiscope, one of those disks that when spun create the illusion of a moving image.
4	Joaquin Phoenix		1,031,901		For those who remember the I'm Still Here days where Joaquin Phoenix had seemingly gone insane and decided to go from acting to rapping, him becoming the certified insane Joker in our #1 seemed like natural casting.
5	Elijah Cummings		940,273		The big death of the week, a Maryland politician who had over two decades in the House of Representatives and this year took over the Committee on Oversight and Reform .
6	Abhijit Banerjee		905,237		Indians getting big views, no surprise here. Though this one had a global interest reason for it, as Banerjee, alongside his wife Esther Duflo and also Michael Kremer, won the Nobel Prize in Economics for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
7	Deaths in 2019		746,129		Last night the wife said "oh, boy when you're dead, You don't take nothing with you, but your soul, think!"
8	El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie		712,432		The show Honest Trailers described as "so powerful, you binge-watch it on Netflix; so all-consuming, you push it on your friends, even if they don't watch TV; and so addicting, you can't shut up about it. It's basically like drugs." gets a Netflix epilogue centered around Aaron Paul's character Jesse Pinkman, that also served as an epitaph for one of its actors, Robert Forster , who died the exact day of release.
9	War (2019 film)		666,731		This Bollywood action epic starring Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff and Vaani Kapoor is now the highest-grossing Indian movie of the year.
10	Tulsi Gabbard		624,330		Hillary Clinton claimed that Russia was "grooming" a female Democrat to run as a third-party candidate who would help President Trump win reelection via the spoiler effect. Many in the media interpreted that as being Hawaiian Representative Gabbard, who denied running independently if not chosen and had other candidates defending her.

Exclusions

• These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.