<quote who="Pine W" date="Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 12:07:53PM -0700">
I suppose you could get more granular data by conducting an opt-in study of some kind, and you would need to be careful that users who haven't opted in are not accidentally included or indirectly have their privacy affected. I agree that collection at intervals shorter than an hour is going to raise a lot of privacy considerations for users who have not opted in.
That would certainly work for some research questions and that's more or less what most toolbar data is.
The problem is that often questions answered with view data are about the overall popularity of visibility of pages which requires data that is representative. There's lots of reasons to believe that people who opt-in aren't going to be representative of all Wikipedia readers.
Regards, Mako