On Sunday, March 18, 2018, Tal Barda 412tal412@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&generator...
I got an API response which contains articles A and B in this order:
- A
- 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:
- B
- 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