[thumper]

Thanks. Okay, I see what you're saying. Actually, they still won't make that information available, though we have been asking a while. That was a big challenge when we started, but I think it was a good constraint because it pushed us in this direction to think about how the text itself evolves. Upcoming work will be looking at new signals to inform the page quality, such as activity on the Talk pages -- so there's no shortage of ideas, only of time to work on it.

On the page views signal - there was a great paper in the last few years that came up with a way to estimate it from multiple other data sources (eg, Alexa). I don't remember the title, but it was an impressive bit of stitching together. If I had the time/money/resources, I would love to get that as a signal in our work and see if it helps. I'm not 100% convinced it would, because of vandalism I've seen which lasted for years on a somewhat popular page -- so even many eyes does not help if no one will take action to fix incorrect data.