Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-24/Traffic report

Traffic report

Two for the price of one

April 3–9, 2016

For the week of April 3–9, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	WrestleMania 32	1,895,563	Up from #7 last week. WWE's annual pay-per-view pantomime took place on April 3, 2016 (the first day of this week's chart), at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, featuring Roman Reigns (pictured), who defeated Triple H. Charlotte won the Women's Championship.
2	Panama Papers	1,644,672	The Panama Papers are a leaked set of 11.5 million confidential documents that provide detailed information about more than 214,000 offshore companies listed by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, including the identities of shareholders and directors of the companies. The first news reports based on the papers went public on April 3. The Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson (pictured), was among those exposed in the papers and announced his resignation on April 5.
3	Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice	1,387,901	The number of views are halved from last week, but still another strong showing after two weeks at #1. Warner Bros might have cause to breathe again for the first time in three years, as their tent-pole gamble and hopes for an entire franchise have, it seems, paid off. Maybe. With $783M earned worldwide up to April 10, the official founding stone for DC's cinematic universe has gone down a storm, with the studio's highest-ever domestic opening weekend. Having cost an estimated $400M to produce and market, this movie will have to make $800M worldwide just to break even, which it appears it will do.
4	Donald Trump	1,021,206	You'll have to applaud Donald Trump, because I really can't recall the last time he wasn't on this chart. His article was the 17th-most-viewed in 2015, with over 14M views, and he has already more than doubled that in 2016.
5	Merle Haggard	991,468	The American outlaw country singer and songwriter died on his 79th birthday on April 6 at his ranch in Northern California. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, he had 38 number one hits on the US country charts and was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement in 2010.
5	Rogue One	979,685	This Star Wars-universe movie, not part of the main series, will be released on December 16, 2016. The release of a teaser trailer on April 7 successfully propelled this article into the chart for the first time. (It almost made the Top 25 in December 2015 during the peak of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens (#21) frenzy.) Felicity Jones (pictured) will star in the film.
7	List of people named in the Panama Papers	926,251	See #2. Wikipedia can be very good at preparing detailed articles like this, attempting to usefully organize massive amounts of worldwide press reporting. Argentine President Mauricio Macri (pictured) is the first headshot of many in this article at the moment.
8	Ravi Shankar	751,268	The famous Indian musician died in December 2012, but a partial-world reach Google Doodle celebrated his 96th birthday on April 7.
9	1896 Summer Olympics	722,779	After a hiatus of fifteen-hundred years, the Olympics were restarted in 1896; the games began on April 6, 1896, 120 years ago. A wide-reach Google Doodle was there to remind us of this.
10	Deaths in 2016	648,626	The annual list of deaths has always been a fairly consistent visitor to this list, and often in the Top 10, averaging about 600,000 views a week at this point.

April 10–16, 2016

For the week of April 10–16, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from WMF's TopViews, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Kobe Bryant	1,393,551	Well he said he would do it, and now he's done it. The career-long LA Laker and 18-time NBA All-Star played his last professional game on April 13, outscoring the entire opposing team in the fourth quarter. And that despite a long series of injuries that led him to make the call to finally retire. Despite being best-known outside the sport for a damaging sexual assault allegation in 2003, he appears to have gone out on a high with fans, with viewer numbers double those of his last appearance on this list, when he made his announcement in November.
2	The Jungle Book (2016 film)	1,036,211	This American film based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, previously adapted to screen in a 1967 animated film, had its world premiere on April 4. It was released in 15 countries on April 8, and debuted in the US on April 15 to a stellar $103M weekend and rapturous reviews (the film currently has a 94% RT rating). Despite being described as a "live-action reboot", the film is really more of a CGI cartoon, with nearly everything onscreen composed of computer graphics, except for the lead child actor Neel Sethi.
3	Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice	890,582	By any measure, except perhaps, its own, Warner Bros's attempt to counter the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a success. It has crossed the $800M mark worldwide, which means that, even given its gargantuan production and marketing budget, it is now in profit, and is likely to generate a tidy sum once the ancillaries are counted. And yet, the mood over at DC/Warner is tense; with its rapidly declining earnings, it is unlikely to enter the "$1 billion club" currently occupied by Marvel's two Avengers films, and has already been outgrossed by Zootopia, released just three weeks earlier. How this will portend for the planned DC Cinematic Universe is uncertain. All eyes are now on Suicide Squad.
4	Danny Willett	811,305	The little-known English golfer came out of nowhere to unseat the favourite, Jordan Spieth, at the 2016 Masters Tournament. After his first majors win, you can safely assume that his article won't be marked "Low importance" for much longer.
5	Doctor Strange	991,468	Marvel's next big introduction is the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth-616, charged with defending our reality from mystic threats. Yes, I just wrote that. The illusive if less-than-illustrative trailer for the new film, due this fall, premièred this week, and has already garnered a combined ~20M Youtube views. You might think this marks a jarring shift in tone from Iron Man and Captain America, but hey, compared to working in Thor, this should be easy. The suitably intense Benedict Cumberbatch (pictured, on set) will be assuming the cape.
6	Donald Trump	762,586	With no Republican primaries this week and little in the way of public awkwardness to push his numbers, Trump seems to be in the list on the strength of his pure, unadulterated Trumpness. Expect him to shoot up again next week after his stomping victory in his home state of New York.
7	Fan (film)	725,098	This Bollywood hybrid of The Fan and Single White Female, in which a Bollywood star and an obsessed lookalike (both played by Shah Rukh Khan (pictured)) gradually become entangled in a game of revenge, was made on a relatively hefty budget of ₹850 million ($13 million) but has already earned more than ₹1.31 billion ($19M) in just five days.
8	Deaths in 2016	668,908	The annual list of deaths has always been a fairly consistent visitor to this list, and often in the Top 10, averaging about 650,000 views a week at this point.
9	Captain America: Civil War	646,147	With the relative disappointment of Dawn of Justice, all eyes are turning to the next big comic blockbuster released this year which, despite the Captain America headline, is being marketed as another Avengers movie (with Spiderman!). Whether this will see it over the $1 billion hurdle remains to be seen, but the omens are good.
10	Suicide Squad (film)	562,067	DC Comics' ramshackle crew of pressganged supervillains, forced to do the will of a shadowy organization or let their heads explode, have garnered far more buzz in the build-up to their August release than Batman v Superman ever managed, thanks to some decently snarky trailers, the latest of which was released this week, and the first live-action appearance of DC fan favourite Harley Quinn, played by Margot Robbie.