I don't know if anyone's looked into this, I'm afraid. I'd be interested to see what our replication lag on production is. I imagine it's pretty small, and so the impact would be negligible, but...


On 27 June 2014 23:24, stuart yeates <syeates@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm designing an experiment and want a random sample of wiki articles. The 'Random article' seems like a convenient way of generating these with having to compile a list of the population of articles myself.

My hunch (based on clicking it lots and very little else), is that 'Random article' is a uniform sampling of pages in article namespace, excluding redirects but including disambiguation pages. As implemented on en.wiki (which is the wiki I'm starting on) it probably has a slight bias against very recently created pages (due to cross-server synchronization).

Has anyone looked into this?

cheers
stuart

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Oliver Keyes
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