Someone needs to run this:
UPDATE cur SET cur_random=RAND()
Here's a quote from Village Pump explaining why:
The pseudorandom number generator which backs the Special:Randompage link appears to be not so good. I just hit it about two dozen times and had several links come up multiple times. -º¡º
Emphasis on pseudo. I got RNA transcription four times in about a dozen clicks - twice in succession. Also, Zog's favorite song came up - but redirected to Johnny Rebel. I thought redirects were excluded. Geoffrey
Here's what I found out with a few SQL queries. The cur_random field values are strongly clustered up around the high end. In fact, there are no articles at all between about 0.18 and 0.4, and only few below 0.18. A few minutes of browsing through the old versions of SpecialRandompage.php shows why. A previous version of the software selected the lowest-numbered cur_random value, and set it to a random value. So here's why we now see poor results: Most of the pages are clustered up above 0.9 or so, so when you click Special:Randompage , there's a high chance of picking one of the few low-numbered articles. The cur_random value is then reset, and there's still a high chance of the new value being below 0.9. Hence, the few priveleged low-numbered articles get selected far more often, and unless someone re-randomizes cur_random column, it take a long time for the high-numbered articles to diffuse back down. -- Tim Starling 04:25 May 1, 2003 (UTC)
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-- Tim Starling.
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