Brion Vibber wrote:
On Sep 16, 2004, at 12:16 PM, samuel wrote:
I am about conduct a study of the quality of Wikipedia's content. In order to do this, I will need to randomly select articles, and for this, the "random page" feature appears a natural choice.
Depending on what you're trying to measure, simply taking a random selection of pages and looking at them in isolation may or may not be useful to you. Wikipedia is a permanent work in progress; its purpose is to generate content and grow and develop it over time. The actual distribution of a published or "stable" encyclopedia is a distinct project from the free-for-all editing on the wiki.
On a similar note, since Wikipedia is strongly a hypertext work (at least in its current HTML-based form; a future print version would be different), random sampling articles from the flat article-space doesn't measure the same sort of experience that users would see. It probably measures something, and possibly something valuable, but it's another thing to keep in mind: people often arrive at Wikipedia pages through other Wikipedia pages, in a non-uniformly-random way.
-Mark