Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-03-09/Traffic report

All business like show business

The Oscars always bring high traffic, but this year they coincided with the quadrennial appearance of "Super Tuesday" and "Super Saturday"; two sets of state primaries in the runup to the 2016 US presidential election. With Donald Trump being accused of bringing show business into politics, with his use of tactics from reality TV and pro wrestling, the collision of these two events is less surprising than it might have been.

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.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of February 28 to March 5, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Donald Trump		8,238,809		With all due respect to Martin Niemöller: first, he said Mexicans were rapists, and they laughed because he was a reality TV star. Then he said Muslims should be marked and tagged, and they laughed because it was obviously a stunt. Then he said America should be closed to Muslims, and they laughed because no one could take him seriously. And then he won nine states in one week, and the laughter ceased, for there was no one left who saw the joke. With the Republican field apparently narrowing to a choice between Trump and Ted Cruz, a choice Republican Senator Lindsey Graham memorably compared to "being shot or poisoned", the low-profile cadre of patricians known as the Republican establishment have apparently realized at last that he has a realistic shot of becoming their party's nominee, whether they like it or not. And they don't. In fact, so little do they like it, they have frantically thrown their weight behind Marco Rubio, who has yet to win a single primary (he has won one caucus) and, despite being described as "moderate", is a card-carrying Tea Partier.
2	Leonardo DiCaprio		3,029,543		22 years after earning his first Oscar nomination for his astonishing performance as a mentally-challenged teen opposite Johnny Depp in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (seriously, if you haven't seen it, do it), Leonardo DiCaprio finally won what had to be the least surprising award of Oscar night. And all he had to do was push himself to his absolute physical and mental limit for months in 30-below temperatures. So, Johnny, if you're looking for that elusive Oscar, there's your path to it. Just sayin'.
3	88th Academy Awards		2,032,515		This year's Oscars were the third-lowest rated since they were first broadcast on television, though only the second-lowest rated in eight years. And that despite the added attention of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, ably dealt with by host Chris Rock (pictured) who had been selected months before it began. The reason for the decline had nothing to do with a boycott (black audiences, according to Nielsen, were down just 2%) and everything to do with an ever-more online world that views live television as an anachronism—and awards as meaningless bling—when set against the wisdom of digitally aggregated crowds.
4	Spotlight (film)		1,453,105		The era of the grand Oscar sweep, when films like Lawrence of Arabia, Dances With Wolves, and, most recently, Slumdog Millionaire could cap a category-spanning flush with a Best Picture win, is well and truly over. These days the Best Picture winner is lucky to walk away with four, three, or, in this case, two wins; the lowest tally for a Best Picture winner since The Greatest Show On Earth in 1953. But while that film was critically reviled, its win widely seen as an insult to the then-frontrunner High Noon, in this case the Academy seem to have aimed above their usual middlebrow consensus and gone for quality. The film, about Boston Globe journalists uncovering evidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, was the most critically praised of all the Best Picture nominees, with a 93 on Metacritic and a 96% RT. In contrast, the presumed frontrunner, The Revenant, was the most critically disliked, with 76% and 82%, respectively. Audiences took notice; the weekend after the Oscars saw this film's Box Office take jump 150%.
5	Room (2015 film)		1,427,944		To the surprise of absolutely no one, Brie Larson (pictured) took away her Best Actress Oscar for her performance as a captive woman forced to live for years in an isolated room.
6	The Revenant (2015 film)		1,327,799		Despite losing the Best Picture nod to Spotlight (see #4) Alejandro González Iñárritu's Western survival epic continues to be popular with both audiences and Wikipedia viewers. The film has earned almost $430 million worldwide as of March 6.
7	O. J. Simpson		1,327,799		The former football player and Leslie Nielsen costar has become a fixture of this list, thanks to the first season of American Crime Story, the true-crime spinoff of American Horror Story, which focuses on his controversial trial in which he was acquitted of murder.
8	Brie Larson		1,090,311		see #5
9	Jodie Sweetin		873,452		This actress is among the cast members returning for Fuller House
10	Kate Winslet		820,600		She didn't make good on her seventh (!) Oscar nomination this year, but the fact that she was there with Leo when he finally won only cemented in the minds of the public that the two Titanic stars were destined for one another, and that her previous two decades of marriage and child-rearing were just a trial separation while she worked out her issues. That and some ill-judged, on-camera tummy-rubbing on the part of Cate Blanchett led to (false) speculation that she may again be pregnant.