On 13-11-11 02:19 AM, Yuvi Panda wrote:
On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Jared Zimmerman
<jared.zimmerman(a)wikimedia.org
<mailto:jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org>> wrote:
What does Meow, Linky, Closer mean?
'Meow' is Category based - it picks an article with the following
process:
1. Pick a non-hidden category of the current page at random 2. Pick
an article in that category at random 3. Go to that picked article
'Linky' is simpler:
1. Pick a random outgoing wikilink of the current page 2. Go to that
picked wikilink
'Closer' is slighlty more complex, and works only when you have used
'Linky' at least once:
1. Make an intersection of all links that were present both in
*this* article and the previous article 2. Pick a link out of the
intersection at random 3. Go to that link.
Which one do you think gives you the best 'related to the current
article, but slightly random' results?
Meow has a few problems.
* It is not good on stubs, because stub-categories aren't hidden.
* It sometimes leads to a category.
* It sometimes leads back to the original article.
* It sometimes leads to images.
(I think all 4 can be reproduced via
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke%27s_Barrage )
On 13-11-11 10:28 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
Very interesting exercise! This is one of those
mobile-initiated
features that desktop users would welcome as well.
Just curious: have you considered to use data from
Special:WhatLinksHere?
Incoming links are less evident than outgoing links. They might help
users discovering pages with less obvious connections, yet still
interesting.
+1 This might help break out of loops.
The other issue is items that tend to be overlinked
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OVERLINKING), eg I ran into
links to [[United Kingdom]] and to [[London]] - I'm not sure if there's
a list anywhere, for bot/script purposes?
Otherwise quite interesting :)
(If you need more ideas/feedback, there've been a few dozen requests for
"a better random button" in The Village Pumps over the years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=random+prefix%3AWikipedia%3AVil…
)