Reflecting in Gethsemane
If I were the kind of person who made snap judgments based on flimsy evidence, I'd say our readership is in a funk. Compare this week's Easter queries to last year's; they're down by 50%. Also, compare this week's "Purple Wedding" on Game of Thrones, which saw the death by poisoning of that loathsome sprog Joffrey Baratheon, to last year's "Red Wedding", down by ≈40%. It's a recurring trend; the Golden Globes, the Oscars and several other annual events are noticeably lower in the rankings from last year. Are people just not able to summon the necessary enthusiasm? Although the barrage of worrisome news appears to have faded from the list this week, perhaps its cumulative weariness has had an impact. The high position for the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, a topic of interest mainly to British readers and so not usually likely to reach the top 25, shows that our readers are in a mood of sombre reflection. Certainly our readers seem drawn to the darker elements of the Easter holiday this year, if the order is any indication.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of 13 to 19 April, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Game of Thrones 
775,534 
Well, it took a week, but Game of Thrones is back on top. Could it have something to do with a certain homicidal brat getting his long overdue comeuppance? 2 Good Friday 
607,170 
It's Easter week this week, and it seems people were more drawn to its dark side this year, the day that commemorates ("celebrates" isn't really the word) the torture and crucifixion (Passion) of Jesus Christ, as opposed to Easter Sunday (below) which celebrates his resurrection. 3 Hillsborough disaster
551,667 
The worst football disaster in British history, in which human crush led to the death of 96 spectators and the injury of nearly 800 more, got some often vociferous attention during the week of its 25th anniversary on 15 April, with some questioning whether the steps taken to prevent its recurrence have inflicted more harm than intended. 4 Easter
549,027 
It's hard to remember these days, under the onslaught of bunnies, chocolate eggs and marshmallow peeps, that Easter, not Christmas, is the most sacred date of the Christian calendar. Doubtless a lot of people learned that this week, along with some fairly eye-raising information about the events it actually celebrates. 5 Bubba Watson
496,963 
One of the few professional southpaw golfers, Watson won his second Masters Tournament this week. 6 Game of Thrones (season 4)
477,676 As usual, people will be using this page to look up air dates. 7 Heartbleed 
444,564 
Despite its virus-y name, this isn't a virus; it is a security bug in the "heartbeat" (basically a repeated "Is All Well?" signal) in the OpenSSL program, which is widely used to provide security for internet sites. It is estimated to have affected 17 percent of all sites using the program, which spooked Netizens en masse this week as they rushed to change their potentially compromised passwords. 8 List of Game of Thrones episodes 
433,201 Most likely air dates again. 9 Göbekli Tepe
423,487 
Southeastern Turkey is home to some of the earliest known urban settlements in the world; so old we don't have names for the people who built them. The Göbekli Tepe site features ritualistic structures that may be as much as 12,000 years old, as pointed out in a thread on Reddit this week. 10 Amazon.com
419,848 
This article has been veering wildly (and suspiciously) around the view graph for several weeks, but at least now its presence on the list has a reason: Amazon Fire TV, announced this week, is a digital streaming device to watch online content on an HDTV. How it distinguishes itself from the three or four other such devices currently on the market is a matter of some dispute.
Discuss this story
Anyway, I hate to sound melodramatic, but if this is your policy for writing these things, you've lost a reader. --Closedmouth (talk) 15:43, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think you should take a list like this as an indication of interest. There are charts that show trends on Twitter and those also aren't exactly a sign of interest, they are a sign of topics that people are talking about at that particular moment in time. Something dramatic happens on The Bachelor? It'll trend. Do people have any interest in this event after the show is over, well, only a few die-hard viewers.
Likewise, the majority of readers (non-editors) come to Wikipedia to seek information. They are looking for answers and details on a subject. The Purple Wedding didn't trend as high as the Red Wedding? It could be after that devastating storyline twist, more viewers are reading the books or looking ahead for spoilers. But there are a LOT of topics that have high interest but don't lead to people coming to Wikipedia to read up on them. Think of how often people who are featured in Google Doodles trend...that's because, for the most part, they often are individuals who the average person doesn't know and so readers come to WP to find out why they are famous enough to have their own Doodle. But that doesn't necessary mean that there is a lasting interest, just a curiosity and the reader ends out being better informed.
So, maybe the Top 25 isn't a chart of popularity or interest but just a gauge of what subjects people were curious about this week. Liz Read! Talk! 20:36, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]