Hi Lars,
Op 23-8-2013 2:48, Lars Aronsson schreef:
The current implementation of [[Special:Random]], however, gives equal weight to every existing article and this is perceived as a problem that needs to be fixed.
We talked about this on Wikimania.
If you compare our current implementation to wheel of fortune [1]; all our articles are evenly spread around. Weighted would be putting bot articles closer to each other so you would hit them less often. You just need a good algorithm to calculate this distribution.
You could implement this algorithm as an extension in MediaWiki that updates page_random with this different distribution. This way you don't need to update the database schema, just the logic at the page save.
Maarten
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wheel_of_Fortune_template.svg