The statistics page for Wikipedia says "There have been a total of 2445066 page views, and 49482 page edits since the software was upgraded (July 20, 2002)."
Will these counters be reset the next time the software is upgraded? Or will they ever be reset or reduced? What do we really learn from these numbers? Could they be more useful if calculated differently? Once the new software is launched for all languages, can we compare the German Wikipedia against the Polish, using these numbers?
In addition to the accumulated value, I think it would be useful to have a value that indicates the current rate of activity, either by beginning a new counter each month (or week), or by having a decaying average (i.e. an accumulated value filtered through a hi-pass filter). Either way, it should use the same definition for different sites, so we can compare values.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org