A few days ago, someone pointed me at
http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/newgrow.htm
which is a dynamically-updating count of the number of records in the Online Computer Library Center's "Worldcat" library card catalog. Also -- this is the cute part -- there's a listing of what the most-recently-added catalog entry at any given instant actually is. Naturally it occurred to me that it would be fun to have the same sort of thing for Wikipedia.
So I dummied something up at
http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cgi-bin/wikitracker.cgi
This is a demonstration only. The implementation is somewhat of a kludge, since it's implemented "outside" of mediawiki, without any direct access to the database. And I'm not proposing that anything like this get officially added to mediawiki, either; it's just food for thought.
I'm going to leave the demonstration running today (November 8) *only*, so if you try the "wikitracker" link after this date, it'll be stale.