Add "Page Views" an input filter and as a sort option in the output.
Problem: Users may use search to choose which pages to edit first, and they may want their editions to be more meaningful in terms of audience. They have a lot of external tools for page stats such as page views, but this not embedded into the search function.
Who would benefit: Let's say an user search for pages in a particular category missing a specific template and get 2000+ results. He wants to start editing the pages and add templates and he wants to do it in the more meaningful way. Such users will benefit from this functionality.
Proposed solution: Add 'Page Views' as an input filter and as a sort option in the output.
Perhaps it is part of the default formula to sort results but I think it has low weight. I use the search functionality quite frequently and I believe this may be the case. I can also tell you that for the same search the output sorting remains the same over time (as expected) but is not clear how it works, neither it is explained at Help:CirrusSearch.--Cabeza2000 (talk) 11:00, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I have dig into this and I see that CirrusSearch already have two rescore profiles giving weight to Page Views. These are named wsum_inclinks_pv and popular_inclinks_pv with the second having a "very high weight on Page Views". This can be seen here. Sadly, I could not find any indication of end users having the ability to modify the rescore profile by themselves. It seems it is just an option for people defining how the CirrusSearch extension is used in each wiki. In the other hand, it does seem that developing support for end users to switch rescoring profiles may not be that hard to develop by the Community Tech.--Cabeza2000 (talk) 12:44, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The default search algorithm on the top 18 wikis by search volume is an ML ranking algo, this uses page popularity (derived from page views) as a feature of the ranking model but it's not quite as simple as more page views -> higher rank. On wiki's outside the top 18 they do not use the page popularity as a ranking signal because outside of ML the way it is combined with the ranking signals would have to be hand tuned for each wiki.
For the question at hand, searching on this field, sure we can add it to a list somewhere and it becomes one of the sortable properties. IMO what this question is asking, with respect to whats currently implemented, is for someone with UI experience to expose sorting in the web ui. Adding the popularity as an option for direct ranking is relatively trivial. EBernhardson (WMF) (talk) 15:26, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support It would be useful to have an easy way to sort articles (in a category, in the search results etc.) explicitly by pageviews. Uanfala (talk) 03:12, 28 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support SEMMENDINGER (talk) 19:30, 16 November 2018 (UTC)