<quote who="Valerio Schiavoni" date="Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 01:56:29PM +0200">
Users mostly read the most recent version of a given page, but from time to time, read accesses to the 'history' of a page happens.
At least as far as know, views to historical versions of webpages in Wikipedia don't show up in the access logs at all because certain kinds of requests (like requests to /w/index.php?oldid=NUMBER) don't get recorded in the pageview data.
New versions of a page are created as well. Finally, users might potentially need to explore several old versions of a given web page, for example by accessing the details of its history[1].
AFAIK, viewing the history page itself is also not recorded in the page view data either.
Regards, Mako