Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/July 28 to August 3, 2024

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (July 28 to August 3, 2024)

Prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, I am RedoStone, Vestrian24Bio, ltbdl, and CAWylie

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All eyes on Paris 2024, with only politics, movies, and both a TV show and that death list that doesn't leave to break out the Olympic domination.

Rank	Article	Views	Notes/about
1	Imane Khelif	6,746,991	Would be nice if the Olympics (#3) propelled an athlete to the top of this list simply for excelling in its sport. Instead the gender controversies that are all the rage nowadays manifested once Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer competing in the women's 66 kg division, won her opening bout in less than a minute as punch to the nose made adversary Angela Carini quit, and soon there were accusations that Khelif was a transgender woman, not helped by an exclusion from the 2023 IBA Women's World Boxing Championships for failing gender eligibility tests. It is far from the truth as Khelif is just a cisgender woman with a manly appearance, not even having the hormonal imbalance of intersex people, but the transvestigation debate remained fiery. In any case, Khelif will be a medalist given she reached the semifinals (boxing doesn't have bronze medal matches).
2	Simone Biles	4,580,661	Three years after a much hyped appearance in the Tokyo Olympics that didn't pan out because she felt ill during the initial competitions, the most decorated gymnast in history is dominating the gymnastics competitions in Paris like she did in Rio, having won three golds in team, individual all-around and vault, and has become the most successful U.S. gymnast in the Olympics and third overall with ten medals, seven golden. Her closest competitor is another Black gymnast from the Americas, Brazilian Rebeca Andrade, who won a gold in Biles' absence in Tokyo but so far only managed two silvers and a bronze.
3	2024 Summer Olympics	3,486,142	France receives the biggest multi-event sport of the world, mostly in host city Paris but with some sports in 15 other Metropolitan France cities and going as far as Tahiti for the surfing competitions. 32 sports are being contested, including the debut of breakdancing, and for the third time a Russian controversy made them to compete with a different name. After the Russian doping scandal led to them being the Olympic Athletes from Russia and the Russian Olympic Committee, this time the Russian invasion of Ukraine made just about every Russian and Belarusian athlete be banned, and the select few that could enter are competing as Individual Neutral Athletes.
4	Deadpool & Wolverine	3,467,395	Again the Marvel Cinematic Universe provides a movie full of nostalgia, fanservice and multiversal shenanigans. Only this time it's far from family-friendly entertainment, as the transition of the X-Men from the Fox film series to the Marvel Studios stable is led by the ultraviolent and potty-mouthed anti-hero Deadpool, who tries to prevent the destruction of his universe by teaming up with the most famous of the Mutants, Wolverine, who in spite of being another Canadian fond of bloodshed is not as welcoming to the buffoonery of the "Merc with a Mouth". The combined power of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in their signature roles, along with the usual action and comedy (only more graphic this time around - there is a man getting his skin ripped off and over 100 F-bombs!) and added tributes to many past Marvel movies, led to Deadpool & Wolverine becoming a smash hit, with positive reviews and massive box office intakes - the $200 million budget alone was covered by the North American opening weekend, and analysts think a billion dollars worldwide is very possible, in spite of high content ratings.
5	Kamala Harris	2,522,226	The vice-president who is now officially the Democrats' candidate for the 2024 United States presidential election, quite progressive to rely on a Black woman (no matter if the competition questions her ethnicity). Expect the next edition to have high views for her and the guy Harris chose as her running mate.
6	Katie Ledecky	1,951,185	Two American women returning to Olympic glory. Ledecky is the most decorated female swimmer ever, and in her fourth Olympic appearance reached 14 medals with the four she got at #3, including gold in both the 800m and 1500m races. Lee was the gymnastics team standout in Tokyo once #2 bailed out, winning the all-around competition, and this time around she shared the team gold with Biles and was behind her and Andrade in the all-around podium.
7	Sunisa Lee	1,604,952
8	Michael Phelps	1,590,737	Two athletes not competing at #3 but present in Paris for other reasons. Phelps is the male equivalent of #6, who became the most decorated Olympian ever by dominating the pools in four different games (this after not winning anything in his debut!), with 28 medals and only 5 of them not being gold, and his appearance this year included a video with Snoop Dogg, who is showing up in a lot of competitions. Owens will never be an Olympian given American football is far from entering the programme, but was cheering on wife #2, which always leads to amusing pictures given he's one head taller than her.
9	Jonathan Owens	1,382,247
10	India at the 2024 Summer Olympics	1,295,100	No surprise in seeing this here, or that the country remains not performing well in spite of its huge population. Still, the first week of #3 had three bronze medals from shooting, two with air pistols and one with rifles. Near misses happened with fourth places in both shooting and archery. As a sidenote, the opening ceremony had the flagbearers be two people good with rackets, shuttler P. V. Sindhu (who couldn't get her third Olympic medal by falling in the first round of the playoffs) and Sharath Kamal of table tennis.
11	Doctor Doom	1,205,000	One of Marvel's most beloved villains, best known as the archenemy of the Fantastic Four, Victor Von Doom is the dictator of the fictional Latveria and proeficient in many things, including technology and magic. All the F4's live action movies so far have included him, to varying degrees of success, but the upcoming The Fantastic Four: First Steps will instead feature the cosmic threat of Galactus. Yet during Marvel's panel at San Diego Comic Con, Doom was revealed as the villain of the fifth Avengers movie, Avengers: Doomsday, to be released in 2026. And to general shock, he'll be portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. , who helped make the MCU such a massive hit playing Iron Man! While there is at least a connection (Doom replaced Tony Stark as the armored hero in Infamous Iron Man), instead fans are questioning how this will work.
12	Donald J. Harris	1,032,825	Donald J. Trump failed to appear again. Instead we have the father of the two ladies to the left, #5 and Maya Harris.
13	Ismail Haniyeh	1,029,963	No one expected the Israel-Hamas war to still be raging now, leading to protests regarding Israel still being at #3 given how much the Palestinians are suffering. One of the men who started all this, the chairman of Hamas's Political Bureau who was filmed celebrating the October 7 attack that led to Israel's retaliation and subsequent invasion, was killed by a bomb in his guesthouse in Tehran.
14	Yusuf Dikeç	988,940	During the shooting competitions of #3, two competitors that only got the silver medals won in another way, earning the Internet's attention for looking cool while firing their guns: Korean Kim Ye-ji (10 metre air pistol), compared to the protagonist of a cyberpunk anime; and this guy (10 metre air pistol team), a retired 51 year old non-commissioned officer of the Turkish gendarmerie who for eschewing all the equipment and just firing with prescription glasses was compared to an undercover hitman.
15	Deaths in 2024	977,879	And you can send me Dead Flowers every morning Send me dead flowers by the mail Send me dead flowers to my wedding And I won't forget to put roses on your grave...
16	Léon Marchand	975,403	This French swimmer, frequently considered to be "the next Phelps" (#8) has been awarded four separate gold medals in the swimming events in Paris, singlehandedly carrying France into third place on the swimming medal table for this edition, behind Australia and the US, and also becoming the first Frenchman to win four Olympic medals in the same year.
17	All-time Olympic Games medal table	973,317	People rushed to Wikipedia to check if their country was good at sports.
18	Manu Bhaker	968,963	#10 owed all but one of their first medals through this young shooter, who was winning international medals at the age of 16, had an underwhelming Tokyo Olympics with no finals at 19, and reached them all at 22 on #3, winning two bronzes in the 10m air pistol contest (female and mixed team) and getting close to a hat trick with a 4th place at the 25m. Along with it being India's first medals in shooting, Bhaker is the first Indian to win multiple Olympic medals in a single edition ever since the country got independent.
19	Tom Daley	901,049	On July 29, this British diver won his fifth Olympic medal since he began competing in the Games in 2012. He is the first Brit to win five diving medals.
20	List of Olympic Games host cities	893,415	The next ones are Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo in the 2026 Winter Olympics, and Los Angeles in the 2028 Summer Olympics, who like Paris (#3) will be a three time host (and like Paris will have a distant sub-venue, namely Oklahoma City for canoeing and softball).
21	2024 Summer Olympics medal table	893,058	62 countries have already climbed the podium at #3, which included the first medals for the Caribbean islands Dominica and Saint Lucia, and both gold, no less! Given the United States were lagging around in gold medals, being behind China and for a time Japan and hosts France, the American media again were trying to rank prioritizing most medals rather than most golds, so they'd still be first, to the mockery of other countries.
22	Steven van de Velde	867,711	Another of #3's controversies was of the athletes being a convicted rapist, namely this Dutch beach volleyball player who ten years ago abused a minor after getting her drunk, and remained on the Games even after a petition with over 100,000 signatures asking for his exclusion. In any case, at least he was eliminated as soon as the playoff round started.
23	JD Vance	835,814	Again, the guy who will run against #5 didn't get on this list, as opposed to his running mate, a Senator with a background in both the Marines and law school, and whose conservative political views should get a lot of discussion until the election in November.
24	House of the Dragon	745,786	The second season of this award-winning prequel series to Game of Thrones premiered about one and half month ago and has been releasing a new episode every Sunday on HBO, with the Season Finale set to premiere on upcoming Sunday.
25	Trap (2024 film)	736,418	Keeping off the 2028 Summer Olympics is another thing that like the Olympics was around in July 2021, as following Old we have another M. Night Shyamalan thriller, where Josh Hartnett plays a serial killer who takes his daughter to a concert and tries to evade the police once they discover he's there.