Requests for comment/Removing hit counters from MediaWiki core

This is a request for comments regarding removing hit counters from MediaWiki core.

Background
Introduced in 45 and 51!

Problem
Approach is fatally flawed:


 * useless metric
 * crazy-simple (and consequently crazy inflexible) metric
 * no concept of date, just a "stupid" stat: it has no granularity for per-month or per-day
 * doesn't work with any kind of front-end caching
 * misleading/inaccurate
 * disabled on any large site; hurts performance when enabled (it's enabled by default, bizarrely) as it hits the database on every page view
 * unmaintained
 * better served by an extension
 * hit count data is lost when a page is deleted; when the page is restored, it starts back over at zero.

Proposal
Does anyone think counters should remain in MediaWiki core? Put it an extension? Everyone just uses Google Analytics, though. So just kill it?

Trivia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:December_2002

How to kill:


 * remove global configuration variable
 * remove database column (page.page_counter)
 * update documentation
 * separate ticket for Wikimedia wikis
 * kill Special page (MostPopular or something)
 * kill footer message and any other messages
 * grep code for remnants