[Foundation-l] Is random article truly random

[WereSpielChequers]

>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:00:26 +0100
> From: Fae <fae at wikimedia.org.uk>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial
>        Content
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <CAHRYMYVZGEqXtxmW78+A71os9DP12HMquAsKVWfQnnVsYYnOrg at mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Sorry to take a tangential point from Tom's email, but is the random
> article tool truly random or does it direct to only stable articles or
> some other sub-set of article space?
>
> Thanks
> Fae
>
>
>
>
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.

WereSpielChequers