On ĵaŭ, 2003-01-30 at 03:17, Jimmy Wales wrote:
What's the wikipedia-purpose of a counter
increment on every page
view? Just to know which pages are popular? We could get the same
information easily enough from a log analysis program, which I could
offload to a less-busy server. Or we could just do without the
information easily enough. It's not really that useful. Or am I
missing something?
I wouldn't miss seeing them go. The counters are fairly arbitrary; they
don't indicate how much time has passed since they began. They include
hits from search engine spiders and the same people passing over the
page multiple times by accident.
The only thing they're used for is the count at the bottom of the page
view, and the Popular Pages list. And they're inaccurate for both.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)