[WikiEN-l] hit counts on articles/pages

[David Gerard]

On 21/05/07, Joe Szilagyi <szilagyi at gmail.com> wrote:

> It might not be completely encyclopediac, but having this enabled and
> tracked could be of tremendous use to see what people are actually *looking*
> for. The technical overhead could be extreme from something like this, but
> I'm not sure.


It is, unfortunately. And once you get into the caching required to
deal with MediaWiki's hugely bloated arse, the numbers become
meaningless.


> Perhaps a section of the encyclopedia with the Top 10 Pages By
> View for each given name space--main, main talk, Wikipedia, Image, Portal,
> etc., and then perhaps also broken down by certain designated categories?
> I.e., the Top 10 BLP articles, the Top 10 Geography Articles, and so on.
> Perhaps sorted by Month, with the results clearing each month, if a raw
> ongoing count would be too intensive?


http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enwiki&ns=articles&limit=100&month=05%2F2007&mode=view

This works by taking a sample of the article hits (1 in 1000, I think)
and providing a raw chart.

How closely it reflects popularity is questionable. That is, "of
articles people went looking for in Wikipedia, the top 100 are ..." We
don't know that this chart reflects that. So it may be of interest
with quite a grain of salt.


- d.