Ok, so attachments don't work. Thus, I copy and paste my brief correspondence with Jimbo. See below.
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Subject: Re: using the "random page" feature in academic studies From: "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 08:33:40 -0700
To: samuel sha@chello.se
Well, as it turns out, I do have a lack of knowledge, and so I recommend to you wikitech-l mailing list or #mediawiki irc channel on freenode.net.
I am unsure how the random article function works, it may avoid certain types of articles for some reason, I don't actually know.
In terms of a study of quality, I do think that "random article" may be a misleading starting point, but of course this depends on the interpretation of the results.
Wikipedia is a work in progress, and so what would likely be interesting would be to have "random articles" but sorted into categories depending on things like: how many edits, how long the article has been around, how "stable" it is (i.e. if it got a ton of edits in the past but has reached an equilibrium now), how long it is, etc.
Any random article is probably not as good as Britannica, for example. But "featured articles" are generally much much better.
--Jimbo
samuel wrote:
Hi!
First off, thank you for bringing one of the best ideas in the history of the Internet to fruition. With that out of the way, onwards to the actual point of this email: 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. However, I cannot find any information on how it works, and it is essential that such information in described in the methodology section of the study. The questions I have regarding the selection are the following:
- What counts as a page?
- Is the selection done from all pages/articles or a subset of them?
- Is there any weight attached to outcomes (for example, so that a very
popular or frequently edited article would have a higher chance of appearing as a random article)?
If you, for whatever reason, have a better idea than using the "random page" feature for a study of this sort, I would be very glad if you could let me know. Also, if you are unable to answer this email for lack of knowledge (I find this hard to believe, but you never know) or time constraints, or whatever, I would greatly appreciate if you could point me in the direction of someone who is more likely to be up for the task.
Thank you very much!
Best regards, Samuel Härgestam, undergrad in mathematics, computer science and philosophy at Stockholm Univerisity, as well as a true Wikipedia lover