Steve Bennett wrote:
Actually now that I think about this, does this actually sufficiently model the data we want to collect? Are we interested only in "how many people visit a certain page" and not also in "how many times a certain page is viewed"? If 5 users spend a whole day arguing back on forth on Wikipedia talk:Pokémon, is 5 or 200 a more interesting/useful/relevant metric for that page?
Me, I think I'm much more interested in the former. Among other things, it's an objective measure of something at least vaguely akin to the elusive concept of "notability", and one big reason for filtering out multiple hits from the same browser is therefore to make it harder for people to deliberately skew the statistic.
The latter statistic -- assuming the argument takes the form of actual edits -- is already derivable directly from the page history, isn't it?