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