Estimating the flow visitors to wikiversity

In this learning project we study how or if we can use only mediawiki technology to estimate the traffic into wikiversity.

Cascading protection would allow one to protect a page by trancluding it into another page. However, the server obviously cannot keep up with all the dynamical data that make up a wiki. This allows us way estimate very roughly the frequency of visitors to a page, to a number of key pages, or perhaps even to the site.

The idea is to transclude an empty, time varying page onto a page with cascading protection (for example, the main pages, as in other wikis), with the following wikitext:

<div style="display:none;">{{some strange pagename/{{CURRENTDAY}}/CURRENTHOUR}}}}</div>

rendering as :

Template:Some strange pagename/24/17

and then use a robot to monitor the transcluded page, starting from one hour hence, and take note of when it becomes protected (ie not editable). This would suggest either the server has updated the page (I am not sure how the database works...) or someone has landed on the main page, triggering the cascading mechanism. With multiple collection points on a few key pages and a sufficiently long observation period, in principle we should be able to estimate the frequency of visitors to the site.