[Foundation-l] Is random article truly random

HaeB haebwiki at gmail.com
Fri Oct 21 08:22:29 UTC 2011


2011/10/18 WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers at gmail.com>:
>>
>>
> Hi Fae,  I don't know about other projects, but on EN wki random article
> means just that. There have been a number of proposals to skew things and
> filter certain things out, but these have foundered on the twin concerns
> that including everything in Random articles best serves those who want to
> intersperse some random reading with things that they can easily improve,
> and that it would be dishonest to tell someone that these were random
> articles when actually we'd filtered out stubs or the unreferenced.
>
> There may well be demand for "random Good Article" as an additional option,
> but that would be an extra not something we could describe as random
> article.
>

There is actually a nice Toolserver tool that can do this, as well as
provide random articles filtered by any other category:
http://toolserver.org/~erwin85/randomarticle.php

The following yields a random Good article on the English Wikipedia:
http://toolserver.org/~erwin85/randomarticle.php?lang=en&family=wikipedia&namespaces=-1&categories=Good+articles&subcats=1&d=0&action=1&submit=Submit

(providing the link to this tool at the risk of enabling teh
censorshipz by dark and powerful outside organizations who might abuse
it to restrict Wikipedia's own unfiltered, free speech
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random according to their own
world views ;)

Regards, HaeB



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