On Sep 16, 2004, at 1:59 PM, samuel wrote:
Interesting. Is Ram-Man and Rambot actual users who submitted such changes, or are the accounts created for the specific purpose of identifying the articles to be ignored?
Ram-Man is an actual human; he set up a bot to do a mass import of stub pages on cities and towns generated from data from the 2000 US census, which created some 30000 pages. After a while he switched the bot to its own account, Rambot.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rambot
According to other posters to the list, there are two ways that certain articles could have negative weights associated with them, the first being those that have cur_random = 0
This only happens in the case of bugs in the software.
and the other being those which share cur_random with at least one other article.
This should pretty rare and hopefully doesn't happen. :) If it turns out not to be rare, a 'jitter' could perhaps be added to compensate.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)