Heinz wrote:

According to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Relevanz the counter for articles in the german wp is disabled. I would like to know why and if all WPs did disable them

They're disabled on all Wikimedia wikis and have been for several years.

Originally counters were disabled because the updates to every page on every page view were expensive on the database at the time.

When we changed the system to heavily cache page views, then the counters would have become useless if reenabled because they cannot count cached page views anyway (since they never reach the web servers).

(Besides that, the usefulness of a one-dimensional hit counter with no listed beginning date or change over time info is debatable.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)