Thank you to efforts by people like domas, and Henrik we now have half decent statistics. They are as follows:
*giant logs of how many hits per page - http://dammit.lt/wikistats/ *Visualization tool (shows bargraph of hits per day, over a period of 1 month. currently has wikipedia plastered everywhere, it really is wikinews though) - http://stats.grok.se/en.n/200806/Main_Page *Popular over the last hour - http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/template:Popular_articles
Woohoo! -bawolff