Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/July 12 to 18, 2020

The Top 25 Report

This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous.
Such material is not meant to be taken seriously.

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (July 12 to 18, 2020)

Prepared with commentary by Kingsif and Igordebraga

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Part celebrity deaths, part Netflix new releases, part batshit rumors, the top 25 this week sees Hamilton finally waning... and being replaced by Glee (for now). Other musicals are available.

Rank	Article	Views	Notes/about
1	Naya Rivera	3,738,808	The actress was found dead in Lake Piru on July 13. This day marked the seventh anniversary of the death of her Glee co-star at #12. With her position this week, she becomes the first of the cast to spend more than a week in the number one spot (and only the third actress to do so). The Ventura County sheriff suggested that Rivera, like Shad Gaspard before her, drowned saving her son in a strong current.
2	Kelly Preston	3,593,242	This actress/model (Jerry Maguire) died on July 12, from cancer. Pandemic aside, her family (including husband at #5) have said they were all in her Texas hospital room.
3	Grant Imahara	1,854,968	The robotics host is another recent death entry – he passed on July 13 from a ruptured brain aneurysm. While best known for his work on MythBusters, he also did a lot of technical work behind-the-scenes on a lot of the Star Wars movies.
4	The Old Guard (2020 film)	1,335,976	In the streaming services battle, Netflix has finally prospered over Disney+ as their 2020 film The Old Guard is now taking over the list. A comic book adaptation, the film is Highlander meets The A-Team (though most reviewers compare it to The Avengers instead), featuring a team of immortal mercenaries led by Charlize Theron, who continues to be as present as Scarlett Johansson in Girls with guns movies.
5	John Travolta	1,311,028	So this is another actor famous for musicals, but he's neither current or dead; he appears after the death of his wife (#2).
6	Alexander Hamilton	1,307,611	People still want to know about this founding father and the subject of #10, though after a few weeks dominating the list after a live recording of the show was launched on Disney+, traffic is slowing. If you're like me, you're now trying (failing) to learn the rap about the Revolutionary War, which is a more embarrassing way to learn about history than just reading Wikipedia.
7	Pizzagate conspiracy theory	888,643	I don't think I'm old, but I'm still lost on the resurgence of this trend. It happened in 2016 but recently became a hit on TikTok. In late June, Robbie Williams said it could be true, so this may have caused all the happily ignorant British people to want to learn about it?
8	John Lewis (civil rights leader)	885,991	Another recent death, but one in politics, an American congressman who even wrote graphic novels about his fight for civil rights and died at the age of 80 of pancreatic cancer.
9	Deaths in 2020	862,341	People are still dying, but it's always interesting to see where this list fluctuates. It usually means a few more famous people have died this week, which our top 3 spots support. This painting is The Death of Lucretia by Guido Reni, and my favorite part is her dramatic eye-roll.
10	Hamilton (musical)	806,876	The 2015 musical about #6 was given a live recording movie that hit Disney+ on July 3. It's starting to drop off the list, but not into obscurity, with other shiny things appearing on streaming.
11	Haruma Miura	804,270	Another dead artist, straight out of Japan and a quite depressing end: actor (of many J-dramas and films such as Attack on Titan) and singer Miura hanged himself at just 30.
12	Cory Monteith	772,632	Known for his role in Glee, Monteith (bottom left) died on July 13... 2013: as mentioned above, the seventh anniversary of his death was marked by the Glee cast coming together after the death of their co-star at #1. The two were reportedly really supportive friends, which is nice to think about given the rest of the cast have been tearing into each other this year. Salling (top left), another co-star as well as an ex-boyfriend of #1, completes the trio of tragic deaths, as he committed suicide in (January) 2018 while awaiting sentencing for child pornography charges. This list is all about stats, so you might be interested to know that Salling's article has spent longer on the list following Rivera's death than his own, also getting more views than it did then. Glee has become oddly relevant in pop culture again this summer, which could account for a higher base level of views for all three of them.
13	Mark Salling	759,566
14	COVID-19 pandemic	724,971	This week in the pandemic, Phoenix, Arizona, (pictured) officially became the outbreak hotspot. Besides the proof that the US has really not been handling this well, this also confirms fears that heat does not help combat the disease, given that Phoenix is also the hottest dang city in the world at the moment.
15	Lisa Marie Presley	723,081	Presley's son, Benjamin Keough, committed suicide on July 12. While not a particularly famous person himself, literally all of Keough's relatives are.
16	Sachin Pilot	717,939	Indian politics is a very big place. Big enough, it seems, for Sachin Pilot to have gone missing but still be tweeting. India itself is a big enough place, with a lot of people, that this relatively internal affair has a lot of views.
17	Jeffrey Epstein	698,509	Epstein and Maxwell are still hanging around the Top 25 after Maxwell was recently arrested for her involvement in Epstein's crimes. She was also denied bail, even after her team argued that she's old and #14 is rife in prisons, because her triple-citizenship and private jets make her something of a massive flight risk.
18	Ghislaine Maxwell	669,257
19	Jada Pinkett Smith	662,001	The Smith family have had an interesting week. Jada and husband Will (#24) had a talk, a public one, about some old rumors of their infidelity. It may be because I just saw #10, but this video chat they put on the Internet seems like 2020's Reynolds Pamphlet: nobody was seriously discussing any affair, the separation was resolved, but they chose to hand themselves in. And they did it spectacularly, since Jada admits her side piece was half her age at 22.
20	QAnon	659,604	QAnon is a conspiracy theory that proposes that secretly in the governmental system of the United States, there's workings that are aimed against incumbent President of the United States Donald Trump. Its dissemination might also be why #7 saw an inexplicable resurgence.
21	USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6)	650,812	A big ship had an explosion on July 12, injuring over 60 people, including multiple civilians.
22	UFC 251	589,031	An MMA event that happened on July 12. It was moved from Australia to an island in the UAE (pictured), because of #14. Held behind closed doors, Kamaru Usman won the main event by unanimous decision.
23	C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)	558,793	For a few days, this comet has been brightly visible in the northern hemisphere. Clear skies necessary.
24	Will Smith	545,472	See #19. Smith apparently gave a 22-year-old permission to bang his wife a few years ago. Nobody thought he did. But he told everyone.
25	Zac Efron	540,309	Efron is the star of documentary series Down to Earth with Zac Efron, released on Netflix this week.

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (July 12 to 18, 2020)

Exclusions

This list excludes 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 talk page if you wish.