2008/7/2 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
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.
Thing is, these institutions - and by extension the people wanting these figures - don't themselves desperately believe that views relate to value. (Ask a librarian about how meaningful they think their circulation figures are as a metric!)
But they *are* impressive. They are, for want of anything better, a first step as evidence that something is being used at all. They're a number you can quote and wave around and put in your reports and your funding requests and your cheerful press releases.
When it boils down to it, we're helping people play the game in order that they can give us better content, and if we need to do vaguely pointless things in order to do so, I say go for it :-)