On ĵaŭ, 2003-01-30 at 03:17, Jimmy Wales wrote:
What's the wikipedia-purpose of a counter increment on every page view? Just to know which pages are popular? We could get the same information easily enough from a log analysis program, which I could offload to a less-busy server. Or we could just do without the information easily enough. It's not really that useful. Or am I missing something?
I wouldn't miss seeing them go. The counters are fairly arbitrary; they don't indicate how much time has passed since they began. They include hits from search engine spiders and the same people passing over the page multiple times by accident.
The only thing they're used for is the count at the bottom of the page view, and the Popular Pages list. And they're inaccurate for both.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)