The system should be able to record when I view pages and the links I take, irrespective of which browser or hardware I am using. A site may also record page impressions served, and any anonymous information about where they are served to.

This would enable meaningful and useful personal history traces, which could be superposed on a page graph. This would be really useful in terms of tracking interests and learning. Obviously, it would need to be able to be securely private, but also sharable.

Maybe we could think of a “my history” page as just another wiki page on ‘my’ server, but instead of being updated with backlinks, it would be updated every time I visited a page.

Of course, there is also the possibility of tracking visitors in some way. What are the established methods, involving (essential?) cookies or not?

All browsers seem to record viewing history for that specific browser, but cross-browser histories seem in the past to have been delegated to bookmarking sites. There must be a lot of work on trying to piece together viewing statistics already done somewhere, and it would seem sensible to include this kind of facility as standard on the wiki software.

In addition, Dokuwiki has a “trace” at the top (as you see here) giving limited browsing history during one session.

Some other ideas are faintly connected to this and to Edit history – like xAPI and ActivityPub – see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking though it’s not social networking we’re doing here.