[Foundation-l] Is random article truly random

Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki at gmail.com
Fri Oct 21 01:06:49 UTC 2011


Tim Starling, 21/10/2011 02:29:
> There's no bias towards or away from porn, however. The distributions
> of page_random gaps are independent of any variable you might want to
> study, like quality or age.
>
> If you try to get a lot of random pages from Special:Random,
> eventually you will notice that some pages are missing and some pages
> come up more often. But if you are only fetching a small fraction of
> the total number of articles, then the statistics of the returned
> sample will look more or less the same as a true random sample.

So this is a problem only for users who (inefficiently) visit 
Special:Random thousands of times (perhaps millions combined) looking 
for (untagged) things to be fixed.
Poor abandoned less popular pages, what a sad and unjust condition. :-(

Nemo



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