samuel wrote:
Yes, I am quite familiar with the nature of Wikipedia and how it works. The object of the study is to measure the quality of the current (by "current" I mean the Wikipedia that exists at a certain, as of yet undetermined, moment in time) online version of Wikipedia, since that is what people actually use.
Excellent. For this, one slight improvement I suggest, rather than selecting random pages, is to select random pages with a weighting adjusted for the traffic to those pages. What we're really interested in is the quality of the content that people actually use, as opposed to obscure "dead-end", orphan or near-orphan pages that end users seldom see.
This is indeed what will be done. It is for the "vice-versa" part that I considered using the "random page" feature to select articles.
It's a good idea -- some form of randomization is a great way to look at it. Probably the random pages feature is too crude to really answer the most interesting questions, though.
--Jimbo