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
Some think counters should remain in MediaWiki core, some don't.

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