On 13/12/05, Sherool jamydlan@online.no wrote:
Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for performance reasons.
I think you're confusing "viewing" with "watching" - you are absolutely right that monitoring page *views* would be very hard, very expensive, and of little value. But by "watching" what is meant is the number of people on whose "watchlist" the page is; this would be fairly easy to determine from the database (we already store everyone's watchlists, obviously) and changes fairly rarely, so that maybe caches could be invalidated when pages were watched/unwatched, or maybe the count becoming "stale" wouldn't be such a problem [especially if it was only ever a ball-park figure].
Meanwhile, I think a version of this may actually *already be implemented* in the software, but switched off on Wikimedia sites, probably for performance reasons. See http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=727 and http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3128
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]