Wikipedia's most viewed featured picture?

In chat with another Wikipedian last night about the Wright Brothers' first flight and interesting question came up: what is Wikipedia's most frequently viewed featured picture? In terms of ordinary monthly traffic that would probably be a featured picture for one of the site's most frequently viewed pages. Based upon a recollection of somewhat out of date statistics I guessed that would be the featured picture of Barack Obama. Further research led to a surprising discovery and inadvertently sparked a small edit war.

A later check confirmed that Barack Obama received 1,644,252 in February 2009. That makes the article Wikipedia's twenty-second most visted page for that month.

Yet it also turned out the Obama biography didn't use the featured picture of Barack Obama. This was odd. A featured picture doesn't need to occupy the lead position, of course, but it usually appears somewhere on the article where it is most relevant. On rare occasions a featured picture gets removed from its primary article through the well-meaning effort of an editor who doesn't have much experience with image use. Normally that's simple to remedy: just reinstate the image with an edit summary explaining that it's featured.

It would be an uncontroversial and straightforward edit at any other article, but what about at this location? Usually I avoid hot potato topics in mainspace. But what the heck? I thought, The election is over. I'll start a thread at the talk page, to be on the safe side. A lot of disagreement followed. When it appeared that an editor hadn't understood the reason for discussing the image I provided two explanations, then made one edit to demonstrate. Perhaps that was too bold under the circumstances, because this followed:

• (cur) (prev) 23:16, 15 March 2009 Bobblehead (talk | contribs) (138,707 bytes) (→Political positions: mv image back to PP, with caption to explain association with section.) (rollback | undo)
• (cur) (prev) 23:04, 15 March 2009 Brothejr (talk | contribs) (138,474 bytes) (→U.S. Senator: 2005–2008: Then the photo cannot stand as it needs a caption for people to understand what that photo is of. As per discussion) (undo)
• (cur) (prev) 23:01, 15 March 2009 Bigbluefish (talk | contribs) (138,623 bytes) (Undid revision 277493834 by Brothejr (talk) - it's a photo of him in the period discussed by that section, not of his political positions) (undo)
• (cur) (prev) 21:37, 15 March 2009 Brothejr (talk | contribs) (138,601 bytes) (Moved image from section due to it not helping the section and buried it down into the article.) (undo)
• (cur) (prev) 21:27, 15 March 2009 16x9 (talk | contribs) (138,623 bytes) (Reverted good faith edits by Brothejr; Image was placed not replaced. (TW)) (undo)
• (cur) (prev) 18:42, 15 March 2009 Brothejr (talk | contribs) (138,474 bytes) (Reverted to revision 277442217 by Cenarium; Reverting back to orgional image, as no reason has been given for image replacement. . (TW)) (undo)
• (cur) (prev) 17:55, 15 March 2009 Rick Block (talk | contribs) (138,623 bytes) (→U.S. Senator: 2005–2008: upright thumbnails are slightly smaller) (undo)
• (cur) (prev) 17:49, 15 March 2009 Durova (talk | contribs) (138,615 bytes) (→U.S. Senator: 2005–2008: +pic) (undo)

Yikes. Well, in order to keep things bipartisan I'll be uploading a speech by George H.W. Bush and nominating it for featured sound. Also located a public domain photo of John McCain taken shortly after his release from a POW camp.