On a default MediaWiki installation, this is enabled by default--to render the basic number of views a given page has received. Has this ever been enabled on Wikipedia for public view? Do the database dumps even track this on, say, en.wikipedia?
It might not be completely encyclopediac, but having this enabled and tracked could be of tremendous use to see what people are actually *looking* for. The technical overhead could be extreme from something like this, but I'm not sure. Perhaps a section of the encyclopedia with the Top 10 Pages By View for each given name space--main, main talk, Wikipedia, Image, Portal, etc., and then perhaps also broken down by certain designated categories? I.e., the Top 10 BLP articles, the Top 10 Geography Articles, and so on. Perhaps sorted by Month, with the results clearing each month, if a raw ongoing count would be too intensive?
Regards, Joe http://www.joeszilagyi.com