This "make a second draw" approach would also let you tune how often you saw the "bad" articles. That is, if it's a bad article, then flip a coin to see if you should make a second draw. Repeat if the new article is bad, but never make more than N draws. Someone with time on their hands and a statistical bent could compute how often "good" and "bad" articles come up as a function of the ratio of good and bad articles, the coin flip probability, and the limit N. --scott On Aug 22, 2013 10:47 PM, "Lars Aronsson" lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 08/23/2013 03:57 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
An approximation would be to select, say, 100 articles from the database using page_random, then calculate a weight for each of those 100 articles using complex criteria, then do a weighted random selection from those 100 articles.
Interesting. An even easier/coarser approximation would be to make a second draw only when the first draw doesn't meet some criteria (e.g. bot-created, shorter than L bytes, lacks illustration).
On an average day, Special:Random (and its translation Special:Slumpsida) seems to be called some 9000 times on sv.wikipedia
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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