User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Technical Update: July 27, 2016/@comment-5645428-20160731221156

Although Popular Pages now makes more sense for the average viewer, it is now lacking relevant data that put the wiki's entire view flow into perspective. A few examples, on my wiki, we kept Top 10 Lists enabled since it was proven by having a category link on the main page that this resulted in a high number of views for them. Another example, we could also track views in the project namespace which made us aware that some of our primary policy pages were getting a very small numbef of views, leading us to include more links around the wiki. We are unable to monitor view numbers for these things now, leaving us without helpful data.

I suggest that a namespace filter is provided in some form on the Popular Pages section. Trending Pages on Special:Community is fine showing just articles, as would reflect the interest of an average viewer versus an editor.