Hi,
I just played a little bit with the "random page" feature on the German Wikipedia and read an article about "Masatoshi Koshiba". After I hit the link for the random page again I was directed to "Skins" which seems ok, but after that I came to "Raymond Davis Jr. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Davis_Jr." who was linked as "see also" on the page of Koshiba. IMHO the random page is not that random at all, on the other hand this could really be a random coincidence. Maybe some of you have an idea if the random mode needs to be modulated... Regards
Thomas aka Urbanus
On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Thomas Luft wrote:
I just played a little bit with the "random page" feature on the German Wikipedia and read an article about "Masatoshi Koshiba". After I hit the link for the random page again I was directed to "Skins" which seems ok, but after that I came to "Raymond Davis Jr. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Davis_Jr." who was linked as "see also" on the page of Koshiba. IMHO the random page is not that random at all, on the other hand this could really be a random coincidence. Maybe some of you have an idea if the random mode needs to be modulated... Regards
The random page on the English one isn't random either. You will regularly get the same page again and again if you try a few times.
This is a shame, because one of the most impressive introductions to Wikipedia is to have someone hit the random page link for a while. The repeating pages kind of burst the bubble. :)
-- Daniel
On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Thomas Luft wrote: The random page on the English one isn't random either. You will regularly get the same page again and again if you try a few times.
Grrr.... looks like the random indices are all off again; somehow MySQL's rand() function is biasing high the way we've been using it, and there are _very_ few articles set with lower indexes (<0.25), so those few get pulled up way too often. I've just told it to redo all the random indexes on the german wiki in a lump; I'll reset them on the English wiki later tonight when traffic is lower.
I've also gone ahead and replaced the random seed generator in the wiki and changed Special:Random to use its own random number instead of asking for one from MySQL. I don't trust MySQL anymore. :) And I took out the reset-index-on-load, which was probably trouble.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org