Do I correctly remember that mediawiki projects do not keep log files and statistics and stuff (other than the ones that can be gleaned from the database itself) to reduce server load? I think I remember somebody saying the even log files are not kept... or that could have been some other reality.
I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics and http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm
And a few other things, but nothing that looks like it would answer some of the questions being asked.
So - hitting an external log with the standard client issued image / javascript type counter thingy would get some of that. More data could be gleaned by combining that with the info available from the database.
Has this already been discussed/beaten to death? Is it a dumb idea?
Anybody got a server and bandwidth to take a gazillion hits to crunch some additional statistics? :-)