Brion Vibber wrote:
The update doesn't really hurt anything if it's run multiple times, either -- the way the update works is that it will add a bogus entry for any page with no entries whatsoever (not even bogus ones).
The update is potentially very slow; running it every time update checks are done would be disruptive to a large site, thus unacceptable.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
Add a field updates_applied to site_stats?