Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-04-02/Traffic report

Traffic report

Regressing to the mean

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The mysterious fate of MH370 still tops the list, but in all other respects our readership has retreated from the real world into its pop-cultural happy place: TV, movies, music, Reddit and Google Doodles all made an appearance.

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.

For the week of 23 to 29 March, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Malaysia Airlines Flight 370	978,855	Interest has barely waned in this ongoing event that is as frustrating as it is tragic. Three weeks in, we still don't know precisely what happened to this flight, or to its 239 passengers and crew, but, gradually, a drip of hard facts is beginning to replace occasionally wild speculation. Leads are coalescing around a violent region of the sea off the coast of Australia, but it seems unclear as to where it is.
2	Amazon.com	908,036	This article is veering wildly around the view graph, in a pattern that is making me suspicious. Still, no reason to assume people aren't interested in Amazon's decision not to launch a video service.
3	Dorothy Height	662,799	The head of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years until 1997 got a Google Doodle on what would have been her 102nd birthday.
4	Graham Island (Sicily)	564,555	There aren't that many landmasses left unclaimed on Earth these days, so modern territorial disputes have an air of Gulliver's Travels about them. But people still take them very seriously. This tiny submerged island, which was claimed by Britain when it last emerged from the waves in 1831, was claimed by Sicily when divers placed a flag on it in 2000, just in case it ever emerged again, as noted in a popular Reddit thread this week.
5	Facebook	457,386	A perennially popular article.
6	Deaths in 2014	422,882	The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article.
7	The Walking Dead (TV series)	382,673	The show's fourth season recommenced on 9 February.
8	Frozen (2013 film)	380,281	Disney's Oscar-winning juggernaut got a shot in the arm thanks to its release on DVD on March 18. Despite this, it is on course to overtake Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest as Disney's highest-grossing film.
9	Divergent (film)	357,749	Another attempt to turn a girls' action novel into a film franchise, ala Hunger Games, this one is a Brave New World rework in which individuals are sorted into 5 classes- the honest, the selfless, the brave, the peaceful and the intelligent- and those who don't fit into those categories are targeted and killed. Question: How could anyone not fit one of those categories? Anyone who is not honest, selfless, brave, peaceful, or intelligent is probably in prison. Still, it made $76 million in 8 days, so it's obviously hit a nerve.
10	Noah (film)	330,078	Darren Aronofsky's high fantasy take on the Book of Genesis has been ambivalently received for its Biblical fidelity, but has opened with a solid $15 million in one day, so obviously people are curious about it.