On Sunday, March 18, 2018, Tal Barda <412tal412(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi!
I have a question regarding the random articles generation in the API.
Let's say I'm using this URL to retrieve two random articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=query&generato…
I got an API response which contains articles A and B
in this order:
1. A
2. B
Is there a chance (I know it's very small, but it's just for my
understanding), that I'll get the exact articles but in the opposite order?
Like this:
1. B
2. A
I'd like to know whether there is certain order for the random articles
in the
API response, or it's also random.
Thanks!
Only if there is only 2 articles in wiki.
There is a deterministic "random" order of pages (on creation, each page is
associated with a random number). The random api module picks a random
place in this ordering to start, and then returns results in order of their
random number.
--
brian