On 19/10/11 02:15, Domas Mituzas wrote:
Short answer: no
Long answer:
we have uneven chances for different pages to show up. It is based on the idea that every page gets inserted into discreetly random position in a certain linear space, so you end up with [[Poisson distribution]], which from a distance seems to return stuff randomly enough, but one page can have 1000x higher chance to be returned than other.
There's no bias towards or away from porn, however. The distributions of page_random gaps are independent of any variable you might want to study, like quality or age.
If you try to get a lot of random pages from Special:Random, eventually you will notice that some pages are missing and some pages come up more often. But if you are only fetching a small fraction of the total number of articles, then the statistics of the returned sample will look more or less the same as a true random sample.
-- Tim Starling