On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Brianna Laugher [snip]
Thoughts? Good idea or waste of time?
It's a good idea to connect the page view stats to provide stats per image and offer aggregates.
But at the same time we don't want to further the belief that views directly relate to value. Providing the right image to the right person has a lot more value than simply showing an image to lots and lots of people.
When an image is placed in some obscure Wikipedia article it might not get a lot of page views, but when it is seen it is probably of substantial interest and value, far more so than yet-another-image scrolling by in a flickr feed.
Wikipedia sees an absolutely enormous amount of traffic but it is distributed over an enormous number of articles, so many pages get fairly few views... but if you took away all the low traffic pages Wikipedia would lose its value almost completely. When something like a powerhouse museum image becomes part of a Wikipedia it becomes more than a single image, it helps complete this enormous and widely used reference work, and its contribution is far greater than the sum of its pageviews.
Just a thought....