Dear List-eners,
I write in to argue the case for an Wikipedia effort to make something like
stats.grok.se (page views per day per article from 2007 onwards) available again.
I am author of the first R-package that was providing easy access to pageview counts by accessing the
stats.grok.se service and translating the it into need little R data frames.
Since stats.grok.se is gone somebody writes in once a month - mostly from academia - asking about the status of page view data for the time before late 2015 - counts, per article, per day. To underline this further: the R pageviews package written by one of your former colleagues has over 7000 downloads within 2 years while my package has 14000 within 4 years (which are conservative numbers because they stem from one particular CRAN mirror only).
I made some efforts to reconstruct the service that
stats.grok.se was providing but well it's not a trivial endeavour as far as I can see (BIG data, demanding some computing time and storage resources and bandwidth, and some thinking about how to re-arrange and aggregate the data so it can be queried and served efficiently - not to mention that the data is raw meaning it needs some proper cleaning up before using, also hosting will need some resources, ...) - and so my efforts have gone nowhere .
Would it not be nice if Wikipedia could jump in and support research by going the whole mile and making those page counts available?
In regard to the prioritizing - I am sure you have a long backlog - I would argue that this is something that really is a multiplier thing. It enables a lot of people to start researching. Daily page counts are not that fancy but without them people are simply blocked. They cannot start because they cant even get a basic idea about what was the general article popularity for a given day.
Best Peter
PS.: I would be willing to put in some time to help you folks in any way I can.