On wikipedia-l, Andre Engels wrote:

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The talk page for "Jehovah's witnesses" had 909 accesses just now. Is that a record for a talk page?

No, it's not. I did a query, and it was at 1090 in the meantime, but Talk:Main_Page, Talk:Julius:Caesar and Talk:List_of_famous_Canadians had more.

The top 20 of most-read talk pages: Talk:Main Page 3508 Talk:Julius Caesar 3479

When did these access counters start at zero? Are they ever reset again, or will they just permanently grow?

I have similar counters in susning.nu, introduced on August 3, 2002, and so far they have never been reset. I guess there could be cases where a monthly or yearly average is more useful, emphasizing the last month. But so far I haven't figured out how I want to do this, and there might be a point in using the same method as someone else.

Technically, the implementation is not difficult. Counters could be reset at the 1st of each month, or a sliding window can be used with a bucket accumulator for each day where the 30th bucket is subtracted from the sum once each day, or a decaying average can be inflated by a computed percentage at regular intervals. The only difficult decision is to choose which method to use. Is there a standard?