[Foundation-l] Is random article truly random

[Thomas Morton]

Just to clarify the technical details for those interested... the code is
located here:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/includes/specials/SpecialRandompage.php?view=markup

It gets a random number using PHP's build into pseudo-random number
generator and uses that to recover an article from the DB.

Ostensibly this gives (currently) 1 in 3,769,030 odds of coming across a
particular page :)

(I say ostensibly because it appears to be a little more complicated than
that - but it does for back-of-the-napkin discussions)

Tom