Doodles of popularity
The power of a Google Doodle to drive traffic to a Wikipedia article is well known. But this week Google really flexed its muscle, cementing three of the top five spots. The chart is topped by George Boole, the inventor of Boolean logic, celebrated by a Doodle on his 200th birthday. And saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax hit #4 with a Doodle on his 201st birthday. (Though their fields were very different, I wonder if Boole and Sax could have ever met?) And coming in at #2 is Day of the Dead, which is primarily a Mexican holiday but has been featured by a Google Doodle displayed in Mexico and the United States (which has a substantial population of Mexican origin) for the past two years. But even when Google only ran its Day of the Dead Doodle in Mexico in 2013, it still hit #4 on this chart, making it difficult to say just how much Google is influencing its traffic.
Outside the top five, we see the annual return of Guy Fawkes (#8) and his night (#11), and the normal mix of pop culture and entertainment topics of the day, from varied niches including country music fans with male vocalist of the year Chris Stapleton (#6) and English football with a BBC documentary raising Salford City F.C. to #13.
For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.
For the week of November 1 to 7, 2015, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | George Boole | 
|
1,462,428 |  |
The inventor of Boolean logic was celebrated by a Google Doodle on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his birth. Boole's work is credited for laying the foundations for the information age. If you're American and missed this Doodle, it is because a Day of the Dead (#2) doodle was used in the United States and Mexico, while Boole was available everywhere else. This makes it even a bit more impressive that this doodle came in at #1 this week, a feat which last happened in late August when surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku topped the chart. |
| 2 | Day of the Dead |
|
1,109,918 |  |
Mexico's carnival of the cadavers is the living dream of any kid who ever wished Halloween could last three days. Up from #9 last week, and probably helped by a Google Doodle which was used in the United States and Mexico. This event also hit #2 last year, and #4 in 2013. Perhaps the jump between 2013 to 2014 is explained in part by the fact that although Google also ran Doodles in those years, it was limited to Mexico only in 2013. Google has run a Day of the Dead Doodle every year since 2008. |
| 3 | Spectre (2015 film) | 
|
1,069,633 |  |
Holding steady at #3 for a second week, but a 35% jump in views. The British are not known as titans of the filmmaking world, but they have staked their claim with this latest in their defining James Bond series. The budget, topping $300 million, makes this the most expensive film ever made without the words "Pirates of the Caribbean" in front of it. After the last Bond film made over a billion dollars, it seems the proudly British producers have confidence enough to stand apart from Hollywood, initially releasing the film in six national territories - but not the US until November 6. The strategy has worked; the film has made almost $300 million so far (as of November 8th). |
| 4 | Adolphe Sax |
|
1,019,466 |  |
Google's nefarious quest to educate the human race continues, as a worldwide Doodle on November 6 commemorated the 201st anniversary of the birth Adolphe Sax, who invented the saxophone in 1846. How many times have you looked upon a saxophone, or even considered the heyday of 1980s rock music saxophone solos, without wondering how or why that instrument got its name? |
| 5 | Halloween |
|
731,914 |  |
On its way back down after peaking at #1 last week. |
| 6 | Chris Stapleton |
|
696,463 | Views peaked on November 5, after the country and bluegrass music singer won the "male vocalist of the year" award at the 2015 Country Music Association Awards. The highlight of the night was when Justin Timberlake joined him on stage to sing his version of the song popularized as a George Jones live show staple, "Tennessee Whiskey", and Timberlake's "Drink You Away". | |
| 7 | Ben Carson | 
|
584,606 |  |
The soft-spoken neurosurgeon and U.S. Republican Presidential candidate has risen to the top of a number of national polls, and thus inviting more attention and scrutiny. The scrutiny includes many press articles dragging up silly things Carson has said, such as stating in 1998 (and confirming last week) that he believes the Pyramids were built by the Biblical Joseph and used to store grain. And on November 6, Politico broke a story that Carson had never been offered a scholarship to the United States Military Academy (West Point), despite stating in his biography and elsewhere that he had. This appears to be more puffery than an outright lie, assuming he was informally told he could get a scholarship which is what he now maintains, not that it matters in the rough and tumble world of politics. |
| 8 | Guy Fawkes | 
|
573,619 |  |
Down about 100,000 views from last year's appearance. In the week of Fawke's eponymous night, which came in at #11, interest in the man himself usually also spikes. Whereupon our readers can learn that the only reason he's been vilified as a master criminal for the last 400 years is because he was the only one of his terror cell who was stupid enough to get caught. |
| 9 | Deaths in 2015 | 
|
557,741 |  |
The viewing figures for this article have been remarkably constant; fluctuating week to week between 450 and 550 thousand on average, apparently heedless of who actually died. Deaths this week (random selections) included Army General Abdikarim Yusuf Adam of Somalia, who was shot (November 1); Japanese actress Haruko Kato (November 2); Colombian actress Adriana Campos (November 3); Finnish sculptor Laila Pullinen (November 4); Russian media executive Mikhail Lesin, who helped found Russia Today (November 5); English football player and manager Bobby Campbell (November 6); and former President of Israel Yitzhak Navon (November 7) |
| 10 | Bob Ross |
|
393,217 |  |
Up from #17 and 393K views last week. Until last week, Twitch.tv was mostly noted as a means for psychopathic tweens to swat hapless gamers. But now, with the launch of the new stream "Twitch Creative", the jaded generation is being introduced to one of my childhood's most serene influences: art instructor Bob Ross, who, in his lilting whisper, urged my parents to paint "happy little trees". A stream of Ross's program aired on Twitch, leading to typically polarised reactions from a perplexed wired community, most of whom have never heard of him. If you do click on this article, I encourage you see the chart which painstakingly tracked the elements which Ross used in every painting he ever did -- trees do dominate the list. |
- See the WP:TOP25 for entries 11-25.
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Table formatting
Ugh, please fix the table formatting. The imposition of either fixed column widths or a fixed table width is causing the last column to become very narrow, and since it contains a lot of text I have to scroll down interminably to read the text in each cell. — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 11:06, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Spectre (2015 film)