[Wikipedia-l] 80,000

[koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com]

Imran wrote:
>Additionally consider how RandomPage is used,
>
>* By people looking for interesting topics.
>* By people looking for pages to edit
>* By people who want to see the scope of wikipedia.
>
>For the first two categories of people, if they find a page interesting
>they're likely to follow up links from it, if not they'll just hit
>randompage again. What these people don't want is to be given another
>article which is very similar to the article they didn't want to read, so
>this will put off both contributors and casual readers.

This is a different matter entirely from what you said, and I'd agree with it.  :-)

>The third category will likely come away with a highly skewed view as to
>the kind of article in Wikipedia.

I still disagree with this.  2/3 of our articles are on small towns in the U.S.  Finding a lot of them gives an accurate representation of what we have.  However, it does not give an accurate representation of what we *want* to have: we want to have articles on a broad range of topics, from film to physics.  And, as you've pointed out, it's not very useful for most people who click on "random page": they're looking for an article they can edit somehow, and most of the cities are not what they're looking for.

>For virtually all uses of RandomPage people do not want or expect to see a
>series of related articles in rapid succession.

I would agree with this too.  Another thing I've noticed about it is that it keeps returning the same "random pages".  You can see this if you click on it more than a few dozen times.

kq