Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-43958241-20200401145330/@comment-9605025-20200401160319

It depends on how Fandom defines it; which they don't tell us. Let's assume it is "people". How do you know who is who? Well, in short, there is no method for identifying actual people. Any method used to attempt identifying people could result in counting the same person multiple times and/or counting multiple people as one. On top of that, there is the question of how long to consider a view. If I view a page now and then 5 years from now, are those separate views? What about now versus tomorrow?

the point is is that views are views. If I were you, I would not try to use that as a gauge of the number of people. - Generally speaking, when a user accesses a wiki (or any website, for that matter) without logging in, there are two ways they can be identified. First is the IP address. However, IP addresses typically assigned to a particular device on a particular network for a given amount of time. This means that, even if it is the same IP address, it could be a different person on the device. If it is a different IP address, it could still be the same person just either on a different network or after their device has been given a new IP address.

An alternative would be to use cookies. I don't know the details but from what I know, cookies are essentially just files websites ask your web browser to save so that they can share information across different pages. They are used to do things like remember the items in your shopping cart even if you closed your browser. Fandom could place a cookie on your computer and then check for that cookie on every page you view to see if you have viewed the page before. However, just like IP addresses, this is not necessarily 1-to-1 with an actual person. If someone else uses the same computer account and browser, then they will have the same cookies. On the other hand, if the user deletes their cookies or uses multiple browsers, they will have multiple cookies. So once again, we have run into the issue where we may be counting some people as multiple people and, in some cases, multiple as a single person.

The last option is to keep track based on registered accounts. While it is true that this also does not guarantee 1-to-1 (some people have multiple accounts, some people share their account), "policy abiding" users won't be sharing their account so we can probably assume the case of counting multiple users as one is minimal. The additional downside is that there are a lot of people who use Fandom without a registered account. If data collection is restricted to registered accounts, then there would be a significant number of people who are not counted just because they don't have an account.