Autumn in summer

The northern summer is a time when one is meant to celebrate the exuberance of life; instead, commemoration of the dead was a significant theme this week, as the top three slots were taken up by the beloved poet Maya Angelou, dead this week at 86, environmentalist pioneer Rachel Carson, and Memorial Day, the US holiday for commemorating its war dead. Even Mark Twain's eerie prediction of his own death, in which he hoped to go out with Halley's Comet, got onto the list thanks to Reddit. Other than that, the usual dose of Game of Thrones; a show very familiar with death.

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

For the week of 25 to 31 May, 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	Maya Angelou	1,227,753	One of America's most popular contemporary writers, Maya Angelou died this week at the age of 86. Since delivering a recitation at Bill Clinton's inauguration (the first poet to give an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost) she became an intellectual celebrity across all boundaries.
2	Rachel Carson	876,502	The marine biologist and conservationist whose 1962 book Silent Spring became a founding text of the environmental movement and led to the abolition of DDT as a pesticide got a Google Doodle on her would-have-been 107th birthday on 27 May.
3	Memorial Day	765,063	The last Monday in May (that's May 26 this year), the day that the United States chose to honour its war dead, is perhaps better known as the traditional beginning of US summer vacation, and is thus eagerly anticipated by millions of people too young to serve but old enough to stand in line for action movies.
4	Game of Thrones (season 4)	712,695	This is the page with the plot synopses for each episode.
5	Halley's Comet	706,568	I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together." So said Mark Twain in his autobiography in 1909, and it turned out he was right. He died the day after the comet's 1910 perihelion. This curious fact managed to spawn a Reddit thread this week (the original poster wondered, I hope jokingly, if the fact that he was born when Halley returned in 1986 meant he was a reincarnation of Mark Twain – respondents were lukewarm to the notion).
6	Amazon.com	701,370	This article suddenly reappeared in the top 25 a few months ago after a long absence; it's always difficult to determine the reasons for the popularity of website articles (how many are simply missed clicks on the Google search list?) but there are a number of possibilities: first, it released its digital media player, Amazon Fire TV on April 2, and second, it is currently embroiled in a dispute with publisher Hachette, a spat with potentially world-shaking implications as to whether book publishers even need to exist in the post-digital world.
7	List of Game of Thrones episodes	642,862	The episode list is probably used to look up air dates.
8	Game of Thrones	587,030	New seasons of this immensely popular show always draw people to Wikipedia.
9	X-Men (film series)	559,739	X-Men: Days of Future Past, Bryan Singer's cross-generational collaboration uniting his original cast of fogies with their younger selves introduced in X-Men: First Class, earned $90 million in its first weekend, but seems not to be generating the fire of other Marvel Comics franchises. Still, it appears to have triggered interest online.
10	Watch Dogs	519,597	The third-person adventure game in which hacking is a significant game mechanic has been hyped to the roof as the showcase for the eighth generation of video game consoles. Well, it worked; the game has sold 4 million copies in its first week.

← Previous "Traffic report"

Next "Traffic report" →

In this issue

4 June 2014 (all comments)

Special report

News and notes

Op-ed

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

Game of Thrones collectively takes top spot. I suspect the total number of man-hours watching Game of Thrones in a single week exceeds the total man hours to create all of Wikipedia. -- GreenC 13:47, 8 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting point. You think I should merge them? That would free up some space in the top 10. Serendi ^pod ous 15:50, 8 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sure why not. I think it's all sort of the same thing anyway the articles are just split for practical space considerations, and it frees up spots as you say, plus highlights the real popularity of the show. -- GreenC 16:00, 8 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I understand the desire to consolidate in order to make room for other topics. But I'd argue against it, in this case it is obvious they are about the same subject but things can get fuzzy very quickly. Better to rate them on an article basis. If people want to see the longer listing, they can look at the Top 25 (which I always check out) or even the Top 5000. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 16:20, 8 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I really appreciate the work that goes into this article, week after week. So, just a quibble: I asked for a correction last week, which was made, and the same error now appears in this issue. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:16, 8 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Two weeks in a row in which a Google Doodle sent readers to a featured article on a female notable. And this week we have two featured articles on female notables topping the traffic list. Well done, Wikipedia! Powers ^T 21:00, 9 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]